Why Measuring TV Ad Effectiveness is Important

Understanding how your TV ads perform is crucial for optimizing your marketing budget, fine-tuning your messaging, and achieving a better return on investment (ROI). Without accurate measurement, you risk wasting money on campaigns that don’t resonate with your audience, reducing your brand's overall impact.

How to Measure TV Ad Results?

There are 2 possible approaches:

1. Calculate it manually: periodically export data and combine it in a spreadsheet. We'll provide an hands-on explanation on how to do this below. Pros: it's cheap, you know the inner workings. Cons: it's less accurate, due to the large amount of work it cannot be done on a continuous basis.
2. Use automatic tooling: Masslytics is a great tool for this. You can start using it for free. Pros: it's more accurate, data is 24/7 real-time available. Cons: you will need our tracking software on your website, in the end it will cost a bit of money after the trial period.

1. Calculate it manually

This is as close as you can get to how Masslytics does it with regular tooling. Follow these steps:

1. Find your filtered average visitors per minute, for every hour and weekday, without TV ads: use for example Google Analytics to exclude all traffic sources besides people coming from search engines and direct homepage visitors. These routes are the most used by TV viewers, so you will need a benchmark number for every hour per weekday. As you are doing it by hand, make sure you calculate this for a period in which you didn't advertise on mass media like TV or radio. Be sure to include PPC visitors via search engines for common routes people will follow from TV to your website. We know this can be quite a hassle to calculate all in all. Your end product should be a spreadsheet with every hour of every weekday, stating an average number of visitors on the assumed TV visitor routes.
2. Make a spreadsheet of your TV influence times: use the broadcasting schedule of your TV ads to calculate which days and times are influenced by the TV ads. A good time window (learned by experience) is to use the period from broadcasting up to 5 minutes after it. For most advertisers, this is pretty accurate.
3. Calculate your filtered average visitors per minute during the TV ad influence times: follow point 1 again, but this time only for the influence times.
4. Compare results: compare your data of bullet 1 with the data of bullet 3. Any uptick you see can be attributed to TV. Lower values of course cannot be the result of TV as it doesn't make sense.

It can be hard and time consuming to make this attribution model. But it can be done for website visitor impact. Masslytics measures more data. Like conversions and ROI, finding sweet spots in time slots and channels, AB-testing of commercials. In practice it's (maybe too) hard to do this by hand. To analyze these, see the paragraph below. Our developers did the hard work already for you :-)

2. Use automatic tooling

Masslytics makes all the calculations automatically. You just have to set this up once for it to work. Install the Masslytics code on your website. Copy+paste your personalized tag from your dashboard and verify installation. This will take you less than 5 minutes total.

Once installed you have to import the broadcast schedules. This can be done by API (automatically) or by hand (by spreadsheet imports). From there, Masslytics will measure your TV ad effectiveness and show you dashboards like this:

There is totally free 30-day period available for you if you want to try it for yourself, without any strings attached. After signup you can immediately start analyzing as if you were a full customer.

Start your analysis

Conversions are measured here too! The software learns the behaviour on your website and the AI will recognise your conversion routes. Click to add your conversion points and voila: it measures conversions from your TV campaigns. Happy attributing!

Key Metrics to Measure TV Ad Effectiveness

1. Reach and Frequency

Reach refers to the total number of unique viewers who see your ad, while frequency measures how often those viewers are exposed to your message. Your broadcaster will provide this data and we will use it for the correlation analysis.

2. Brand Recall and Recognition

Brand recall tests how well viewers remember your ad after watching it, while recognition assesses whether they can identify your brand or message when prompted. Conduct surveys or focus groups post-campaign to gather insights into these metrics. Tools like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey can help with this process.

3. Call to Action (CTA) Responses

Many TV ads drive viewers to websites or specific landing pages. You can track the direct results of your TV ad by using Masslytic software, which measures visitor traffic originating from your ad.

4. Sales and Revenue Impact

Analyzing sales data is a direct method of measuring the effectiveness of TV ads. By comparing sales figures before, during, and after the campaign, you can assess the ad's impact. Use tools like Masslytics and Google Analytics for online sales tracking or your point-of-sale (POS) system for in-store sales.

5. Return on Investment (ROI)

Calculate ROI by comparing the cost of the TV ad campaign to the revenue it generated. A positive ROI indicates a successful campaign, while a negative ROI suggests changes are needed for future ads. Use the formula:

ROI = (Revenue - Cost) / Cost

If you can’t directly track sales, you can use website traffic as a proxy. Masslytics provides data on unique sessions generated by your TV ads, allowing you to calculate cost per session easily:

Cost per visitor = Cost / Number of visitors in Masslytics

Methods for Measuring TV Ad Effectiveness

1. Pre- and Post-Campaign Surveys

Use surveys before and after your campaign to measure changes in brand awareness, recall, and consumer sentiment. This method helps assess the influence of your ad over time.

2. A/B Testing

Test different versions of your TV ad to identify which performs best. You can adjust elements like the message, CTA, or air times. Track responses and engagement metrics to determine effectiveness.

3. Attribution Modeling

Attribution models help you understand how your TV ads contribute to the overall marketing effort. This involves assigning value to your ad's role in the customer journey. Though complex, it’s effective for campaigns involving multiple channels. Tools like HubSpot and Adobe Analytics can help develop these models.

4. Media Mix Modeling

Media mix modeling evaluates the performance of different marketing channels, including TV, to identify the most effective combinations. This method involves advanced statistical analysis and is best suited for large campaigns involving various media.

Conclusion

Measuring the success of your TV ads is critical to achieving the desired outcomes from your marketing efforts. By focusing on key metrics such as reach, frequency, brand recall, CTA responses, and ROI, and by using methods like surveys, A/B testing, and attribution modeling, you can gain valuable insights into your campaign's performance. Leveraging technology enhances this process, enabling you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your future TV advertising strategies.

Sources

https://www.qualtrics.com/strategy/brand-tracker-software/
https://switchnetwork.nl/naamsbekendheid-vergroten