Media Mystics

Performance of an ad: Optimising the campaign

The purchase of media time or space is a skill in itself and has never been easy for the agency. To top it all, there is always the matter of convincing the client that the space bought is the best vis-a-vis the kind of cost involved. In recent times, media buying has undergone tremendous shifts. Media buying today is not the sole proprietary function of the agency. Take one look around at the varied media shops being opened up: shops that provide a multitude of media services - right from the start of a media plan to the last scratch till the creative goes onto the designed media schedule.

The problem however arises when media buyers consider their work over once the creative is trafficked to the medium it was planned for. Is this it? Actually, it is when the last "so-called creative" has gone, that the work of the media buyer increases. How?

The idea is that of closely monitoring a campaign's effectiveness - online or off-line, studying the switching between different creatives and shifting the media weight placed on each of them, in accordance to the performance of each medium vis-à-vis the target audience behaviour towards the creative. This would enable the buyer/agency and the client to determine the effectiveness of the money spent on the medium.

Most often, agencies and clients alike treat online campaigns like print campaigns - sending them out to the respective site representative and then waiting for the results at the very last minute. The problem that occurs is - what if there arise any changes at the last minute? What if the campaign has not been monitored well?

Performance benchmarks

The performance of an ad does not depend solely on the click-through rates. There is more to it. Sometimes, click-through data is the only information available to a buyer or the agency; often this does not serve the purpose of data performance measurement. Only when the objective of the ad is that of driving traffic to the website are the click-through rates a good indicator of performance. On the other hand, when the objectives are that of sales and branding, click-throughs are not most often used as a relevant measure of the ad's success.

For instance, say an agency called "Dream Works" puts together a three-site, four-week campaign for a site called Mothersday.com, that began running two weeks before Mother's Day. The first two weeks worth of click-through data signifies that some sites are doing better than the others, implying that one creative seems to be out-performing the other.

To avoid the kind of confusion created, the agency decided to look at the following parameters only: The relative performance of two creatives within the same site. For instance, the ad on "Mother: The Greatest" has outdone the creative on "Mother's Day: Free Shipping" by say about twenty-five percent. On the other hand, looking at the click data available, the "Mother: The Greatest" got around twenty clicks to Free Shipping's fifteen clicks in the same media placements.

This is only the 1st tier information available i.e. through the percentages and the outnumbering of the creatives. The 2nd and 3rd tier processes will further help in optimally determining creative and media performance.

On further scrutiny, it can be observed that the surfers who got pulled in by the "Free Shipping" creative are more, but the people who entered through the other creative are more qualified based on the participation in the trial period on the site and on the basis of understanding of the concept of "Mother's Day". On the creative front, the ratio turned out to be 2:1.

During the purchase period, we also notice that the ad " Mother: The Greatest" earned three purchasers for every one that "Free Shipping" earned.

From the above example, it can be seen that media buyers need to look at other dimensions to determine the performance of the ad through factors such as the purchases made, the number of click-throughs, the pull factor of the ad, etc.

Media agencies must make sure that the campaigns respond accordingly to the on-going analyses. For this, the media agency must remember to collect the 2nd and 3rd tier data from all fronts i.e. through the customers on what they saw in the ad that motivated them to click and purchase the item. This shows that they related to the medium (in this case site) through which they were exposed to the site.

A media analyst would have to look at the following factors when it comes to optimisation of the medium:

• Differing media prices: For instance, the price of an ad insertion on a site like Amazon is far more expensive when compared to that on a site like Sify.
  
• Over-delivering and under-delivering sites: This aspect should be considered very seriously because this would reflect not only the image of the site, but also the image of the advertiser. For instance, if an advertiser places his ad banner on a porn site, that would clearly be indicative of the products it sells and the image it will create in the minds of the surfer.
  
• Non-parallel creative tests across different sites to arrive at a decision about where to advertise.

Often, it is the sheer gut feeling of a site that has performed well in the past, with a similar kind of an audience that drives advertisers to draw conclusions about the performance of an ad across sites. Media buyers need to be careful about the Cost-per-ad factor while purchasing online space. The deals must be constrained by targeting and adopting a creative message to ensure some kind of audience quality.

Related reading:

1. "Performance Data Trilogy: Optimising the Campaign"; Tillinghast, Tig; Click Z: Apr 2001
2. "Navigating through Analysis Paralysis"; Eisenberg, Bryan, Apr 2001
3. "Wrapping up the media plan"; Tillinghast, Tig; ClickZ; Jan 2001