How do you Measure Campaign Success on Digital?

Digital marketers, are often told that the beauty of Digital is that it can be measured. Since everything can be tracked using technology, one can follow the customer though the buying journey, intervening at important points. And hence, it also becomes easy to measure campaign effectiveness. But the problem starts when you are actually asked to measure it. Two major issues arise: First, unlike other mediums, digital has no one body or tool like BARC or IRS to measure. While one can cull out basic numbers from Comscore or Similar Web, the data is so piece meal or conflicting with other reports that you are not sure what to rely on. For example, Comscore gives web traffic coming from desktops but not from mobiles. Similarly, IAMAI and Google come out with reports on total internet audience & daily active users, but these are conflicting. So, to expect tools to provide campaign data & competition media spends, is a distant dream. So is measurability across platforms (desktops & mobiles) and sales attribution to digital. Second, there is no one metric on digital like is in the case of GRPs for TV and readership or circulation for print. For digital there are impressions, clicks, fan growth, engagement, views and multiple other measures making it difficult to decide what one metric to use for measuring a campaign.

The first issue is more of a technological challenge which many companies are surely trying to address, but the solution is not available at this point of time. But the second issue is definitely addressable. But the question arises - which metric is ideal- clicks or impressions, engagement or fan growth, views or reach. If you think you know the answer to this one, you have started all wrong.

The first step is to decide what the objective of the campaign is. Unless you know that, it is impossible to evaluate the effectiveness. Normally campaigns can be divided into 1.Brand & 2.Product which can be further sub divided into (a) Awareness (new product); (b) Education (when awareness exists) & (c) Drive Trials/Sales. For example Coca-Cola will continue to do brand campaigns unless it was to launch Coca-Cola Vio; Microsoft will do brand and education campaigns for Office but awareness campaigns for Cloud Services as not many people know about it. Needless to say, a campaign can be a mix of any of the above. Let’s look at what metric to use for these kind of campaigns.

1.      Brand: Like all traditional media campaigns, the only way to measure this is through research. Either brand tracks or research done exclusively for the campaign. The advantage of the latter is that there is less chance of wrong attribution of Digital to TV. Players like Nielsen now allow evaluation of campaigns by running such researches at nominal costs.

2.      Product:

a.      Product Awareness: Since you are trying to create visibility, the most effective metric in such circumstances is ‘Reach’. Reach unlike impressions is the actual number of people who have been potentially exposed to the campaign. Also there will always be audience duplication when a campaign goes live on multiple platforms, and hence it is important to consider the non duplicated campaign reach. This can be tracked through ad tracking platforms like Sizmek and Double Click. The same metric can be used even if your communication is in the form of video, in which case you would look at completed unique views. When doing awareness campaigns, it helps in having a 3rd party research in place to close the loop on effectiveness of messaging.

b.     Product Education: With the clutter that exists on digital now, it becomes important that there is constant dialogue with your target audience. For such campaigns, engagement is normally a good metric as it confirms that your audience has spent some level of time on your content before interacting with it. Within engagement, there are likes, comments & shares. The latter 2 are more important than ‘likes’ as it requires a bigger commitment from the user. If the communication is in the form of interactive videos, interactions would be a good indicator.

c.      Product Trials & Sales: These are the easiest to measure. Actual sales are the best way to measure any campaign because at the end of the day, that is the reason of existence for most companies.

Having said all this, it is not to say that clicks, open rates and other metrics are not important. These give a good indication of how specific properties have performed. Once you have decided on the metric, you would need to set benchmarks that you would need to target for your campaign. What those need to be require a whole other article. But the above mentioned yardsticks would best serve you in deciding if your digital campaigns have done well or not.