It’s a big decision to venture into the TV world for the first time and if you don’t have all your data points joined up, you might feel like you’ve failed at the beginning. However, if all the right pieces are in place at the outset, TV can help take your brand to a whole new level…
We’ve outlined the methods and online tools the Join the Dots team suggests using in order to make your first TV campaign a success.
Step 1: Understanding your focus
For many clients, their experience of an agency planning and buying a performance TV campaign for them will involve agreeing a top line demographic audience, signing off an airtime schedule, and getting a delivery report. That’s it.
As so much response from broadcast channels now goes online (74% of adults dual screen weekly, Touchpoints 2017 IPA), you need to make sure you measure response holistically in order to understand the real ROI of a TV campaign.
More than any other channel, TV has the reach and scalability to transform your business, so calculating the real ROI is essential for growth.
Before you can even think about the schedule, your start point is to set the objective of the campaign and work out what the measurable KPIs are and how you are measuring them. These will vary from business to business, but the process and tools remain the same.
Step 2: Measuring activity
Activity that your campaign has generated can be measured in two ways: direct attribution and uplift during the campaign.
Measuring direct attribution
The first way to measure activity is to look at the response directly attributed to TV within an attribution window. For this, we recommend Adalyser, which helps measure attributed site visits and attributed on-site conversion. You can also upload client telephony and SMS data to Adalyser to get a complete view of directly attributable response.
Measuring uplift during the campaign
The second way to measure activity is by looking at the uplift during the campaign, compared to the periods directly before and after. It’s also worth looking at year-on-year, to make sure there aren’t any seasonal factors affecting the data.
For this, your start point should be to make sure your site is properly tagged and your GA goals are set up correctly. We then recommend using a variety of tools and data points to get as full a picture as possible. These would include (but are not restricted to):
- Customer acquisition data,
- CPA and AOV from your CRM platform
- Tracking data from other offline channels such as call volumes
- And any changes in brand awareness scores from brand tracking surveys
When a brand is on TV, they invariably see a surge in search for brand terms, so we recommend you look at what happens in:
- Google Ads to see uplift from PPC
- SearchMetrics and Google Keyword Planner to see what happens with SEO ranking and organic keyword performance
- Google Trends to measure any increases in perceived demand for the product
Combining both steps
Many clients have different agencies rostered for TV buying and search requirements, which often makes it difficult to fuse different types and formats of results data to get the holistic view of the campaign.
We suggest using bespoke reporting tools in order to join up all the data points and provide an all-encompassing view. This will allow you to determine the real ROI of TV campaign and help build the business case for scaling TV activity in order to drive growth.
At Join the Dots, we are passionate advocates of the power of TV to transform your business. If you would like to discuss this further please drop me an email.
