How To Measure Digital Ad Effectiveness?
Here we have a giant CPG (consumer-packaged-goods) company, P&G making the E-Marketing efforts to investigate the effectiveness of their digital ads on different online sites such as search engines (Yahoo) and social media (Facebook). Known as the worlds biggest advertiser, P&G has invested heavily into their optimization of digital marketing advertisements! Rather than alter the shape and size of their traditional advertisements from other medians such as over the Television or print ads, companies such as P&G are creating specific digital ads based on their research findings from their digital optimization system.
This digital optimization system is also known as Smart Media where it analyzes not only click-through rates but also flash surveys on actual purchase intent over various ads and their placements. The program also takes into consideration of the headline, hair visual and background color of the digital ads. Depending on the performance of these elements and actual click-through plus purchase intentions, the program reveals data that can greatly assist in future digital ad placements! For instance, white background ads have not worked as well on Yahoo Ads, the ads with orange backgrounds received the highest click-through rates and blonde hair tends to receive better response than brunettes on some websites.
I believe this to be an incredibly smart method of online optimization as P&G has successfully developed a method to measure the success of their online ads without the need of Google Ad-words for instance. Additionally, all the data generated from this Smart Media program is also shared with the company’s agency of record (an advertising agency that works closely with a company). Whether or not the program is exclusive to P&G only may still be debatable as other competitors may wish to also invest in such a helpful tool in calculating the effectiveness of their digital ads!
Here is a link to the actual article >>> http://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-finds-orange-ads-work-facebook/232931/ <<<
The move towards measuring the success of their digital advertisements has now become a trend as companies such as P&G invest for a more promising online marketing strategy!
Really interesting post! I work part time as a market research assistant and have personally created different ads and observed the variance in performance. And so, I fully understand the scope of how small changes like the headline, hair visuals, background colours of ads can influence consumer evaluation.
It’s definitely interesting to see how a contained research project (where we have a pool of willing subjects) can be applied in the real world on a “sub-conscious” level where consumers do not even know they are part of an “experiment”.
I would actually be really curious to find out whether real life experiments like what P&G does provide the same results as the ones contained experiments do.
Will definitely be following this trend now to see if other companies start evaluating ads the same way! Thanks for the read.
This is incredibly fascinating. P&G is always finding effective ways to optimize their media spend, and this is a perfect example of it! I agree that it’s extremely intelligent to test different display ads on different websites. In my past work experience working on digital marketing for a large telecommunications company, testing and optimization was measured on a weekly basis as this medium offers the accessibility to look at results. This system of digital optimization using specific digital ads tailored to different target audiences is a new concept. I wonder if this is a status quo strategy among most CPG or large corporations with million dollar muscle.
Thanks for sharing!