TV & Digital Campaign Measurement

1. Define your KPIs

Before setting a campaign measurement strategy, it is important to start with basic objectives. Seems simple, but this step is often overlooked by even the most seasoned marketing teams. If you don’t know your goal, how will you truly measure success?

For this step, answer two key questions:

• What are the goals of this campaign?
• What are the key performance indicators that will help us quantify progress?

This chart is a great example of a specific and measurable business objective matched to critical tracking metrics.

2. Ensure your brand messages are seen by real humans

The robots haven’t taken over yet, but to properly analyze the efficiency of your campaign, it is essential you ensure the impressions you paid for are valid and viewable.

This means not counting impressions served to bots or those that were served to someone who wasn’t even in the room. In this fast-paced, algorithmic-dependent industry, it’s more impressions than you might think.

Therefore, measuring and detecting invalid traffic (IVT) is a requirement for all TV and digital campaigns.

3. Establish relevance before expanding reach

Once you confirm your ad was seen by a person, ensure that this person is the one you set out to reach in the first place. Just because you reached a human, doesn’t mean it was the right one.

In a test with 30 brands across a variety of industries, we discovered that ~47 percent of impressions were off-target across TV and digital—no matter the size of the campaign or notoriety of the brand. For every impression that went to someone relevant, another did not.

For successful advertising, quality trumps quantity. Employing advanced measurement helps you avoid high rates of off-targeting before you put all your chips on the table.

Let’s apply this to an example. If you are a brand trying to sell diapers, it’s helpful for you to know fewer than 20 percent of US households either have a child that is of diaper-wearing age or are expecting a child.

If you can spend your budget targeting only those households expecting babies or with children of diaper-wearing age, you increase the percentage of relevant households that receive your message and your campaign will be much more effective financially, as well as from a reach perspective.

4. Reach your desired audience at a reasonable frequency

Once you’ve established your relevant reach, it’s time to talk frequency of messaging. Or can you not concentrate with that commercial jingle still stuck in your head because you’ve heard it five times in only 15 minutes of streaming?

Polling the same brands and publishers from our previous relevance exercise, we determined that ~2 impressions per household per week was an ideal threshold for frequency—anything more was considered wasteful.

Measuring against a timeframe of seven weeks, the median campaign data we pulled saw that 20 percent of campaigns were exceeding that ideal household impression target. And the larger the campaign, the bigger that percentage “saturation waste” scales.

Ensuring that you reach your audience but do not over-saturate them is an important element of measurement. Establishing the ideal cadence will only come from closely monitoring and adjusting frequency. To learn more about ad overload and how to avoid it with cross-platform measurement, check out this video:

5. Get a consolidated view of real-time campaign performance

This final step is an important one but perhaps the hardest to achieve. Most cross-platform campaigns require pulling disparate data sources together, a time-consuming process for an already busy team. And one of those different sources will invariably lag behind by weeks.

Eliminate the workarounds inherent with siloed datasets and antiquated measurement standards by getting a real-time, synthesized view of campaign success across devices, channels, cost metrics, and audience characteristics. These metrics will help you monitor and optimize immediately, quarterly, and annually.