Campaign & Ad Effectiveness

Norstat specialises in high-quality data collection for advertising effectiveness research. Our quantitative and qualitative research methods ensure reliable data gathering about any desired topic or target group, allowing you to measure advertising awareness, the effectiveness of creatives, and inform future campaign planning.

Why measure advertising effectiveness?

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

John Wanamaker (1838 – 1922)

In today’s world, the impact of advertising spend is quantifiable. But, while sales data, website visits and other analytics can be helpful for evaluating advertising campaigns, dedicated market research provides additional context, allowing for a more holistic measure of campaign performance.

For example, changes in awareness and perception can have a lasting impact on sales, but your own data – even with sophisticated market mix modelling – may not capture the full effect. Asking your target audience what they remember, think and feel about your advertising and brand, using a test and control methodology, provides immediate feedback on your campaign’s outcomes, independent of other marketing and operational factors.

Bespoke solutions from Norstat

Our data collection services are tailored to meet your needs and budgets, allowing cost-effective measurement of ad and campaign performance. Whether you’re looking for quick ad awareness tests or more extensive surveys for evaluating cross-media multi-market campaigns, Norstat’s online market research panel enables you to capture the opinions of a specific audience and prompt them with creatives.

Our recommendations for ad testing

Norstat’s online panel enables you to capture the opinions of a specific audience and ensure respondents can be prompted with a creative. Our high-quality panel of 4 million respondents across 19 countries in Europe allows us to collect large samples cost-effectively, with in-depth profiling and screener questions to reach the exact target audience you require.

• Two waves of research (pre & post) allow us to collect data so you can measure shifts in key brand metrics. The main purpose of pre-stage research is to establish benchmark metrics. A larger sample size in the post-stage will allow you to conduct more granular analysis amongst sub-groups in order to measure ad and campaign effectiveness.
• Where appropriate, we can add data collection for mid-stage research. A mid-stage can be useful if the principal advertising ends before the full advertising period has ended.
• If there is seasonality or competitor advertising to compensate for, it may be worth exploring a test and control methodology by location or other criteria so those effects can be accounted for.
• Our surveys can incorporate campaign material (visual, audio, or audio-visual) within an online interview to gain an accurate picture of advertising recall and an in-depth understanding of message takeout.
• We know the importance of asking the right type of questions to measure campaign objectives effectively. Our Full Service capabilities allow us to advise on questionnaire design, script surveys and much more.

Key metrics for testing advertising effectiveness

The primary research objective is generally to evaluate the overall effectiveness of an advertisement or campaign across key brand metrics. Typical metrics may include:

• Unprompted brand awareness (Respondent awareness of brand x and competitors)
• Unprompted advertising awareness (Can respondents remember the campaign spontaneously)
• Media attribution
• Prompted brand awareness
• Prompted advertising awareness
• Advertising attribution (Where can respondents remember seeing the campaign)
• Prompted advertising recall through exposure to the advertisement used within the survey
• Creative likeability
• Key message take-out
• Evaluate brand understanding and overall brand perception
• Demonstrate call-to-action generated by the campaign

Open-ended questions allow unprompted brand and advertising awareness to be measured and provide qualitative insights, which can then be categorised into a quantitative format alongside highlighting revealing comments.

Face-to-face surveys for specific locations

Some advertising, particularly for outdoor campaigns, can be very location-specific. To ensure sample sizes are large enough to support accurate data analysis, we can provide an additional boost by using face-to-face interviews. The research audience will be similar to the campaign target audience as respondents will only be recruited from the regions where an advertising campaign has been active.

Deliverables

While our focus is on delivering the highest-quality data possible, we are available to provide as much or as little support as you require to process the data for your analysis.

• Data can be supplied raw, or as Excel data tables with pre-agreed crossbreaks to include demographic sub-groups, as well as different groups from the survey questions.
• Following the completion of post-stage research you will be able to evaluate against the key campaign objectives, measuring campaign success and pull out key insights in terms of changes in perceptions towards the campaign product/service.
• Statistically significant differences between findings from important sub-groups can be highlighted. Subgroups of interest may include those who recall the advertising vs. those who don’t, those who have visited a website vs. those who plan to vs. those who don’t plan to, and numerous demographic groups.
• Many clients prefer data to be available in our sophisticated Dashboards solution, which provides a seamless way to compare data between waves of research. This allows you to develop benchmarking data to assess the impact of many different campaigns over time.