The Importance of Ad Tracking
01 Oct 2015
David Ogilvy, often referred to as the father of modern advertising, once said: “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals”. If your company is spending significant money on advertising, it is pertinent to conduct research to determine whether or not it’s working.  Above all, ad-tracking is one of the favored methods used by brands today. If a company truly wants to optimize its advertising budget efficiently, it’s important to track and measure the response to its ads.  This analysis also lets a brand know if its advertising is becoming stale or over-exposed among its prospects.  

Ad Tracking Steps

The first, and perhaps most important step in ad-tracking is to start your research before you actually launch your campaign. In order to measure the success of a campaign, it’s advantageous to have an idea about your prospects’ awareness of your brand. If a company doesn’t start evaluating the reactions prior to the campaign, how will it be able to measure whether or not the campaign is increasing awareness?

Surveys are a standard method for tracking campaigns (i.e. commercials, print, digital, etc). If a survey respondent can recall an advertisement or brand name unaided or without a prompt, it is a sign that the ad campaign may be increasing brand awareness. Therefore, once the respondent has answered questions aimed at gauging their unaided awareness of a brand, the survey can begin to focus on extracting information through prompts.  For example, of such a question might be, “Which of the following brands are you familiar with?”

From an Ad Tracker to Accomplishing Advertising Goals

The goal of any advertising campaign is to raise awareness and change attitudes about a particular product or service. Therefore, additional questions that elicit opinions, attitudes, and purchase intent are useful in the ad-tracking process, telling us what’s working and what isn’t. And over time, consumer opinions and attitudes tend to change and evolve. As a rule, a rising tide lifts all boats, and tracking the success of advertisements over time does just that. For instance, if your ads don’t develop over time, they might grow stale and consumers will stop paying attention. But if you work on your advertising success so that they progress by using an ad tracker, your business will prevail as well.

A successful ad is like a joke; the good ones may make us laugh or bring a smile to our face, but will eventually become stale and forgotten. And if an advertisement is a joke, ad-tracking can be seen as an honest friend, letting us know when to retire it and start working on some new material.

If you want to learn more about advertisement optimization, please check out this blog post here.

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Provoke Insights is a full-service brand consultancy and market research firm. Our innovative approach helps brands navigate through today’s cluttered marketing space. We are the nerds behind the advertising, branding, media, and content marketing initiatives. Our obsession with data and research makes your marketing strategy compelling and impactful.

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