By Rasheeqa Jacquesson, marketing science partner for MEA at Meta
Measurement has never been more important than in today’s environment. There have been seismic shifts in the consumer and digital landscape.
Marketers face challenges as the digital ads ecosystem evolves, driven by both shifting consumer behaviors and Industry and regulatory changes that benefit consumers’ privacy. Marketing organisations that demonstrate high effectiveness are already investing more in their measurement approaches and including more data types to evaluate performance.
Given changing shopping behaviors and loss of signal, measurement strategies that brands currently use may have been developed based on metrics and channels that are no longer readable due to signal loss. Using an outdated approach can fail to give your organisation a holistic picture and accurate view of marketing performance.
Also, with increasing pressure to deliver efficiency, businesses who understand what’s working will be able to increase sales profitably.
We believe a key path to marketing success and powering business growth is through measuring what matters. But that goes far beyond traditional post-campaign measurement and media metric optimisation. It means testing what works, focusing on business outcomes and using the learnings to inform future strategies.
Understanding the strong connection between marketing and return on investment is a core challenge for most marketers today, no matter the industry.
While this is a difficult task to tackle, it’s still extremely important. Organisations are prioritising measurement more than ever, because marketers are now being held accountable for moving real organisation metrics quicker, and attributing these metrics to campaign performance.
At several global companies, experimentation has helped spur business growth with ROI increases of 20 per cent or more.
Here are four tips to help you measure impact this Ramadan.
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Use lift testing to learn the incremental impact of your marketing
As the digital landscape shifts, lift testing is increasingly important to help quantify and validate your advertising. Lift tests use test and control groups, which can determine if a new tactic or strategy drives better results. For example, you can see which customers purchased a product because of your ads, and which customers have made purchases without being exposed to your ads.
Incrementality is the measure of true value created by any business strategy. It’s a relatively new term,
but not a new concept. It is a way of determining the measurable value of your ads, by comparing people who’ve been impacted by the strategy to those who haven’t.
The beauty retailer, Sephora, raised brand awareness by a 5.7-point lift in ad recall in the Middle East with a Facebook campaign that mixed video ads and augmented reality ads to appeal to people at all stages of the purchase journey, measured by a brand lift study.
2 Optimise for the tactics that work best by leveraging comparison testing
Once you’ve identified your most effective campaign tactics, you can focus on implementing what works best. Testing your strategy helps you find your best-performing ads. A/B testing is Meta’s solution to helping advertisers simply and accurately test different ads to help you understand what performs the best.
A/B testing allows you to test different versions of your ads against each other, so you understand which elements drive the best performance. It’s ideal for businesses who want to learn which tactics work best so they can optimise their future campaigns. In general, an A/B test is recommended for day-to-day, tactical optimisations.
Ekaterra brand Lipton wanted to understand the impact of in-stream video ads on overall brand metrics. The campaign during Ramadan included personalised video variations mapped against specific target audiences. Creative cut-downs were also developed to cover 3 main aspects of the holy month: Suhour, Series and Gatherings delivering more than 40 variations. Results were measured by an A/B split-test, with a 17.2 point increase in ad recall and a 4.3 point increase in favorability with In-Stream ads.
3 Challenge your previous approaches
Be willing to challenge what you think you know about your marketing performance outside of Ramadan and rethink your established best practices in order to find something better.
Because the ecosystem is always in flux, there will be times you find your previous best practices are no longer relevant. That’s where a learning mindset is valuable.
To make the most of testing, we encourage you to take an agile approach to your marketing which involves continuous testing, learning and iterating to continually improve and optimise the effectiveness of your advertising.
Remember that what has worked today probably won’t work in the future, you need to continue to test and keep learning. We recommend that you test regularly to optimise your campaigns and maximise your businesses growth.
4 Build cross-channel insights with Marketing Mix Modeling
As businesses prepare for a more privacy-conscious future, they are increasingly looking to marketing mix modeling (MMM) to help them understand cross-channel impact. MMM has become more accurate than ever before thanks to innovative technology.
Embrace marketing mix models that help you grow your cross-channel knowledge and awareness. This can be extremely beneficial if you are spending significant budgets across multiple channels online and offline this Ramadan.
