We always underscore the importance of marketing for any business. These days it is even more strategic in that you can explore both online and offline marketing options. If as a business you are not already running ads for your business you need to step up. Anyways, it is not just enough to appreciate that ads are important. You need to know the art and science of making effective ads and that is a huge field on its own. In this article, I want to focus on how you can measure the effectiveness of your ads.

Data Analytics

This works for digital marketing through the use of websites and social media platforms. Those platforms have in-built data analytics tools that you can use to make sense of how your ads are performing. On social media platforms, the data set available to you is even broader when you do pay ads or boosted posts. You will be able to tell how many people were reached, their locations, what they did upon seeing the ad, and several other useful characteristics.

On platforms like Facebook, some of the core key performance indicators (KPI) you use to measure ad effectiveness can be CTR, CPC. These are click-through rate – the number of people clicking on the ads versus total ad views. Cost per click comes from dividing the money you paid for an ad by the total number of click-throughs.  For websites, there is what is called Google Analytics which provides comprehensive data about activity on your website. Data analytics provides the best toolset to measure ad effectiveness which is why it is important to have your business online.

Tests Or Experiments Or Surveys

There a couple of tests you can conduct to measure the effectiveness of your ads, be they online or offline. There are 2 particular tests I am sharing that you can do for your business; there are several more of course. These are tests you can do before you run your intended ad. You can also tweak them and do them at any other point. These are direct ratings and recall tests. Here you will be endeavouring to find out the opinions of a representative subset of your target market.

The first one entails availing several different ads to some of your customers. Then you will ask them to give them ratings. For instance, you can give categories under which they will rate them, say out of 10 or as a percentage. Examples of categories can be how clear the message is, length, quality, and so on. Then we have the recall test. Basically, ads are meant to be unforgettable; customers must retain as much about the ad as possible. You simply avail an ad to them and soon after you ask them to say all that they remember about the ad. You can even spread this out across different time points.

Doing such tests or experiments before also plays the crucial role of creating a baseline. This will work as a reference or basis for tracking your ads later. In conducting these tests you can use tools such as questionnaires – physical or online ones. You can even conduct interviews where needs are or make use of polls. You can use structured customer feedback forms that they can fill in physically or online. Basically, you must just figure out an effective way to get customer feedback.

Important Considerations

How effectively you can measure the effectiveness of your ads starts way before the ads themselves. Broadly, the effectiveness of an ad can be measured before it is put out and after it is put out. When planning your ads you must build monitoring and evaluation tools into them. This will make it easy to track and monitor how your ads are performing. For instance, when issuing out an ad you can include a specific contact number that people will use to contact your business. That way you will easily get to determine how many people came through because of the ad. Another example is how most businesses use promo codes. That is a tool that can also be used to measure effectiveness. The bottom line is when planning your ads do not forget that you will need to measure certain things later so incorporate them from the beginning.

It is vital to know that measuring ad effectiveness is not as simple as it sounds. Some various metrics and variables come into play and as such, it is not always black and white. In principle, the two core components that are measured regarding ads are sales and communication. In short, you can measure the effectiveness of an ad by looking at how much it managed to communicate the intended message. A good ad is supposed to influence people’s aptitude and preferences, amongst other things.  Then of course sales should tell you whether or not the ad did its job. This is an ever-evolving field and you can experiment for your own context to see what really works for you.