Tracking Campaign Performance with Market Research
Campaign performance is often measured in impressions, video views, clicks, and conversions. However, this doesn’t always present the full picture of the campaign’s goals and achievements. Market research data can supplement performance data to provide a fuller picture of how campaigns have impacted consumers’ thoughts and behavior. There are many ways to capture this additional data – which way is best for your campaign?
In-Platform Brand Lift Studies
Many digital platforms like Meta, TikTok, and YouTube offer brand lift studies on sufficiently-sized campaigns. These studies survey platform users who have and have not been exposed to the campaign, and ask them awareness and affinity questions related to the campaign.
Pros: Low effort and often included for free alongside larger campaigns. Platforms can often provide category benchmarks to compare performance.
Cons: Platforms are “grading their own homework,” and so are incentivised to report good results. Low response rates require a very high number of impressions served. Questions available are often very prescriptive.
Custom Brand Health Surveys
Using self-serve survey tools or a survey and panel provider, brands can create their own custom brand health surveys to capture sentiment pre- and post-campaign. Brands can write their own surveys, covering whichever topics are relevant to the campaign, and select their own target respondents.
Pros: Very flexible and able to cover attributes unique to the campaign or brand. Scalable based on budget and research requirements. Can be modified in-flight or between flights as needed.
Cons: Depending on screening criteria, may be challenging to obtain statistically significant sample. Risk of respondent fatigue if survey is too long. Flexible format may make it more difficult to manage internal stakeholders.
On-Site User Research
Brands can gather feedback about their products or website experience on their own website, from users who are actively using the website or interacting with the brand. Most content management systems (CMSes) will include plug-ins for this type of research, making it easy to add without additional code.
Pros: Feedback is gathered precisely when users are interacting with the brand, giving the freshest insights. Can relate the questions to specific on-site actions.
Cons: Research may interrupt users in their purchase journey. Difficult to recruit participants unless incentives are offered. Respondents that have had a negative experience may be more likely to respond.
Focus Groups
What you might think of when you think of market research, focus groups are a classic way to get feedback on a product or service. Participants get together in a room or virtually, and respond to questions about their thoughts and behavior in real time. This is one of the most personal types of market research.
Pros: Participants give the research their undivided attention. Can show ads and/or sample product for immediate feedback. Can have participants elaborate on comments in real time. Can be in-person or virtual.
Cons: The most expensive type of research. Sample size is very small. Multiple focus groups required to get a national sample if in person. Responses will generally be qualitative and not quantitative.
Syndicated Research
Research providers like Applied Knowledge create syndicated research studies, which provide broad insights about category users and behaviour. These studies are most often ongoing studies, collecting qualitative trended data.
Pros: Can be more cost effective than custom research. Useful for tracking overall category trends and demographic information about category users. Often trended, so can compare behavior over time.
Cons: Often has a fixed set of questions that relate to the category as a whole and not the needs of specific brands or campaigns. Competitors may be working from the same dataset, so deeper insights are required to gain a competitive advantage. Unlikely to contain specific insights about current campaigns.
Applied Knowledge has extensive experience with syndicated research, in-platform lift studies, custom brand health studies, and on-site user research. Contact us for more information about how you can integrate research into your media plans.