5 Ways to Accurately Measure Advertising Effectiveness

Whether it’s checking your phone for the latest Instagram updates or simply driving to work, ads have become an unavoidable part of life for us all. None more so than with tech and digital companies looking to increase customer reach, build brand awareness, and increase sales and demand.

In the last decade or so, cross-channel marketing in particular, has become a powerful tool for creating effective advertising campaigns. Perfect for promoting any type of product or service, cross-channel marketing is a customer-focused digital marketing technique that uses multiple channels, devices, and platforms to get your brands' unique message across – e.g. emails, texts, social media, content marketing, apps, and search engine optimization (SEO).

From traditional printed advertising to social media and web banners, the range of advertising mediums available to savvy business owners today is virtually limitless. Of course, crafting the best marketing campaign takes time and finding out which advertisements haven’t been effective is all part of the process. 

Accurately measuring advertising effectiveness plays a pivotal role here, and that’s exactly what we are going to discuss in our guide right here. Ready? Let’s jump straight in.

What Does Advertising Effectiveness Mean, Exactly?

In a nutshell, advertising effectiveness is a method that measures how successful your advertising campaign is at capturing the attention of your target audience.

Advertising effectiveness helps to effectively measure the ROI, strengths and weaknesses of an ad to fine-tune it for future success.

Why Is It Important to Measure Advertising Effectiveness?

Essentially, measuring advertising effectiveness helps you to determine your advertising campaign's progress and understand what's working and what needs to be revised.

A prime example of this is using advertising metrics to increase brand awareness and generate more leads. By measuring the number of times your audience engages with your ad, you gain access to data that shows the number of clicks received or the amount of new subscribers added to your email list.

To streamline your policies, roles, metrics and standards, you could also look into employing a data governance platform.

What Makes an Advert Effective?

If you’re wondering what drives advertising effectiveness, here are five fundamental points to consider:

1. Creativity: The effective use of entertainment and experience. If your creativity is uninspiring, the following points will be ineffective.
2. On-brand: A variety of long-term factors, including market share, brand penetration, and the ability to retain loyal customers relative to the competition.
3. Reach: The number of people that have seen your advert within a set period.
4. Targeting: The measurement of how well a campaign has reached an intended audience.
5. Recency: When a consumer sees an ad in relation to their actual purchase.

How Do You Measure Advertising Effectiveness Accurately?

Measuring advertising effectiveness starts with understanding the impact and reach of your advertising campaign. With this in mind, here are seven ways to get it right from the beginning.

Set Clear Goals

Avoid any ambiguity by making sure your goals are clear from the outset.
This is where SMART marketing goals come into play. Short for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely, this framework is ideal for successful goal setting.

Specific

First of all, ensure your goals are specific, precise and definite. So, instead of just wanting to increase your number of Twitter followers, set a goal of increasing them by 10% within one month.

Measurable

Goals must be measurable, so putting metrics in place will seamlessly quantify and track the progress of your specific goals.

Achievable

Are your goals realistic? Identify and utilise available resources, define issues and expectations, and plan the most effective route forward. This could result in scaling objectives down for goals to remain achievable.

Relevant

Setting goals in line with your values and long-term targets is another important point to consider. So, make sure your goals align with your broader business goals, too.

Timely

Goals must also have a deadline to achieve a particular metric. It's OK to be ambitious, but remember to be realistic too!

If you're looking for more flexibility, greater collaboration, and a diverse range of perspectives, running a virtual brainstorming session with a remote team is also worth investigating.

Site Traffic Analysis

By comparing site traffic before and after the campaign, you can see if more people are visiting your website.

From finding and analysing competitor keywords to optimising page speed, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) also plays a key role in maximising advertising effectiveness. After all, search engines offer the highest conversion rate for advertising. Google has the highest conversion rate (8.2%), followed by Bing (7.6%) and then Facebook.

You may also wish to consider domain redirect traffic advertising. This happens when a domain name is purchased and 'parked' for future development. For example, you could purchase a .ai domain from Only Domains and redirect your Anguilla-based users to promoted landing pages of interest.

Assess Lead Quality

How likely are your leads to turn into customers? This is determined by your lead quality. You can gauge the quality of a lead by:

• Assessing the types of pages they visit 
• Time spent on every page 
• Learning how they discovered the page

Scrutinise Key Metrics

Analysing your campaign's performance pre-campaign and post-campaign will ultimately establish what worked and what needs to be changed. 

Some of the most effective product metrics that can be used to effectively measure advertising effectiveness include the following:

Average Click-Through rate (CTR)

The ratio of clicks on your link to impressions your link generates.

For example, video advertising gets the most click-throughs. A recent HubSpot survey backs this up, with 92% of video marketers reporting video advertising gives them a positive ROI, up from 87% in 2022.

Conversion Rates

The number of users who’ve completed a desired action. This is calculated by taking the total number of users who convert, dividing it by the overall size of the audience, and then translating it into a percentage.

Did you know the latest market insights from Statista reveal mobile e-commerce sales now make up 60% of all global e-commerce sales? So, it’s essential to take mobile advertising conversion rates into consideration, too.

Cost per Click (CPC)

Pay per click is calculated by dividing the overall cost of your ad spend by the number of clicks your ads have received.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Referring to the amount of revenue earned for every cent spent on a campaign, ROAS is calculated by dividing the revenue applied to your ad campaign by the cost of the campaign.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Not to be confused with ROAS, ROI is the profit generated per ad dollar.

Revenue

Regularly review your revenue goals to check they are correctly aligned with your marketing strategy.

Gather Survey Data

The strength of audience survey data cannot be underestimated. By asking the right questions, you'll be able to find out how many people saw your ad, find out viewers' opinions on the campaign and verify if potential leads find your brand memorable.

Generating lots of ideas just like a discussion forum, data ingestion processing is also worth considering for transporting data from one or more sources to a target site for further analysis.

Review Omnichannel Marketing Strategies

According to PWC's latest study, the number of companies investing in a multi-channel experience jumped from 20% to more than 80% since 2012.

Also known as the 'omnichannel' experience, the cross channel marketing method unifies your message across all platforms for a smoother, more interactive experience for everyone involved. It's about creating a seamless, personalised story about your brand across multiple channels. However, getting the mix of media correct for your specific audience can be a daunting task. 

As well as a variety of intuitive marketing tools, ways to measure the success of your omnichannel marketing strategy include:

• Cost Per Impression (CPM) 
• Social media engagement metrics, e.g. likes, shares, and comments 
• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) 
• Churn rate

When we think of ‘big brands’ who’ve built a successful cross channel marketing strategy, coffee-giant Starbucks really stands out. By combining a fun-to-use rewards app and a free rewards card with the latest mobile payment technology, Starbucks’ omnichannel strategy ticks all the boxes for modern consumers on the go.

Many of the biggest brands out there are aligning effective cross-channel marketing strategies with a variety of advertising effectiveness techniques to propel accurate results. In line with key advertising effectiveness principles, effective cross channel marketing strategies should focus on visibility, measurement, personalisation, and optimisation for the best possible outcome.

Unite Campaign Results With Revenue

Of course, the ultimate outcome is to increase revenue. But shareholders and directors aren't interested in the results of one ad, they want to know exactly how it will influence long-term financial results. 

Thankfully, there are online platforms designed to predict how changes in brand value affect overall revenue streams. Useful for evaluating the financial impact of media investment that leads to top-line earnings, linking campaign outcomes to revenue can help to cut wasted ad spend and notably reduce risks, too.

For improved risk mitigation, better flows of materials and information, and higher efficiency rates, increasing numbers of companies are investing in the latest supply chain optimisation software, too. Combined with a detailed advertising effectiveness strategy, you can alleviate risks, control and reduce costs, and boost revenues and profitability with ease.

Ready to Accurately Measure Advertising Effectiveness?

Advertising effectiveness offers greater agility and visibility, mitigates risks, and increases efficiency across the board. This is why a variety of digital professionals and tech companies are investing their time and effort into the ways we’ve outlined above to measure their advertising effectiveness.

Helping brands understand the impact of their campaigns on the audiences they want to attract ad effectiveness will help you identify the best bits of your campaign and build on them for future success.