How to perform advertising research to measure campaign impact

Find out if your target audience is receiving the right message. Avoid spending money on ineffective advertising. Or, ensure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns—all with advertising research. 

Let’s review what advertising research is, how and when to conduct it, and analyze its impact on your brand.

Advertising research is a type of market research concentrated on the performance of ad campaigns. It is used to identify what ads will be the most effective before an ad campaign, monitor brand health while it’s running, and analyze the success of a campaign after it is finished.

The overarching goal of advertising research is to increase your understanding of your customers, so that you can provide ads that show how and why your product best meets their needs. This type of research can also help you determine the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and help you increase the cost-effectiveness of launching those campaigns. The most common reason companies do advertising research is to find out if the advertising they do is meeting company objectives.

Advertising research yields benefits throughout the campaign development process across three main stages: pre-launch, in-light, and post-campaign.

Pre-campaign advertising research covers your target audience, concept and theme testing, message testing, and copy and creative testing. Every stage before launch is dedicated to understanding your market and determining which advertising will land hardest. Most of this data comes from market research surveys.

Pre-campaign advertising research breaks into three stages:

Before even considering the creative aspects of your ad campaign, it is important to know who your target audience is and the different segments it contains. This allows you to create general ads for your entire audience and targeted ads tailored to your segments.

Divide your target market into groups based on common characteristics that make sense for your advertising campaign. Collect demographic information to build accurate buyer personas. These personas will identify to your team what market segment they are targeting with their advertising messages. 

Common market segmentation examples include demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic segments. Your segmentation will depend on your brand, product, and goals.

Look deeper into your target market segments with usage and attitudes surveys. Find out who is buying your product, where and how often they purchase it, how they use your product, attitudes toward your brand, and other in-depth insights into your target market. Your approach may be one of understanding your product category shoppers, market sizing, brand insights,  customer segmentation, or a combination of these.

Use the collected data to further understand your market segments and their shopping habits and identify needs that can be addressed in your advertising.

An examination of drivers and barriers reveals what consumers perceive as advantages and identifies barriers to purchase. For example, you may find that a key driver for a chocolate purchase is taste, and a barrier to purchase is unattractive packaging.

This information can be quantitative and qualitative survey questionnaires.

Now that you have a thorough understanding of your target market and its segments. It’s time to start planning your campaign. The first step is to determine your campaign objectives. Set a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goal.

To help you set your objectives, take the time to assess your brand before your campaign begins.

To determine the current status of your brand health, you’ll need to measure:

All of these factors yield metrics that, together, provide you with a picture of your brand’s overall performance before the campaign begins. The Brand Tracker market research solution offered by SurveyMonkey collects all of this data and makes it easy to analyze your brand health.

Test your messaging and creative with a sample of your target audience before you launch so you’ll know what works for your target customer segments. This allows you to make revisions and adjustments before launch for the best possible results.

Present your early-stage ideas to a sample audience to gather data on their reactions. Find out if the theme and creative you have in mind appeal to a representative sample of your customer segments before investing in fleshing out the full campaign. 

Does your message resonate with your target audience? Are your claims believable? Find out with messaging and claims analysis and update the campaign as needed before launch.

Once your message and creative pass early testing, put the finished ad in front of your real target audience with Ad Testing from SurveyMonkey LaunchPad. This advertisement testing step gives you fast, statistically significant feedback before a single media dollar goes out the door.

Here's how it works:

Testing ad copy specifically, not just visuals? Start with the Ad Copy Testing Survey Template to structure your questions before you build a full ad test.

More types of creative testing from SurveyMonkey:

More types of creative testing provided by SurveyMonkey:

Once your campaign launches, research shifts to monitoring performance while it's in flight.

You’ll likely have more than one version of your campaign running. Conduct tests to see which one performs better with your target audience.

Also called split testing or bucket testing, A/B testing compares two ads head-to-head to see which performs better. Data analysis determines which variation drives more sales conversions.

You already have a pre-campaign baseline. Now track whether your advertising is moving that baseline.

Monitor social channels for mentions of your brand and track what's being said, including hashtags that reference your brand or product name. Social listening tools pull data from every channel into one place.

Our Brand Tracker will help you spot trends and monitor metrics related to brand health. Your dedicated dashboard makes it easy to understand the impact of your ad campaign.

If your advertising campaign is for a new product, are your customers aware of it? Measure with the Brand Tracker to find out whether awareness of your product is rising as your campaign runs.

Ads underperforming your predictions? Test variants of the current creative and messaging with Ad Testing from SurveyMonkey LaunchPad for more A/B testing.

Campaign wrapped? Now research its impact.

There is no exact way to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. Still, there are several metrics that will help you determine whether your ads are achieving their purpose.

What did your target segments do in response to your advertising campaign? Find out with these metrics.

The impressions metric indicates the number of times the ad is displayed or shown. This shouldn’t be confused with the number of viewers that have seen the ad. This metric should be readily available from the platform you’ve posted your advertisement to—Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The share of voice metric allows you to compare brand awareness on various platforms against your competitors. This is a good gauge of your brand’s visibility. 

Reach indicates the total number of people who have seen your advertisement. This is similar to the number of unique visitors to your website. Reach is the total number of unique viewers for your ad. 

Depending upon where your ad is being shown, engagement metrics can include clicks, likes, comments, and shares. Basically, whenever a viewer takes an action on your ad.

A conversion metric is whenever someone who views your ad takes the desired action that usually moves them forward in the customer journey toward a sale. Examples of conversions include clicking an ad and making a purchase, requesting information, providing their email address, signing up for a newsletter, or completing a form.

Conversion rate = total number of conversions / total ad interactions

The cost per acquisition (CPA) metric indicates how much it costs to get one customer to take an action that leads to a conversion. It is used in pay-per-click (PPC) ads, affiliate marketing, display advertising, social media advertising, and content marketing.

CPA = total advertising cost / total number of conversions

Reducing your CPA increases your return on investment (ROI). 

Some metrics require you to conduct surveys to acquire the necessary information.

The purchase intent metric will provide an estimate of whether and how much your customers intend to purchase in the immediate future. Your advertising should positively affect purchase intent—measure purchase intent metrics with post-campaign ad testing surveys.

While you’re measuring purchase intent, check out brand awareness. This is the degree of customer recognition of a brand by its name alone. This should increase after a successful ad campaign.

Brand association is a person’s mental connection between a brand and a quality or concept. For example, most consumers associate the Nike brand with athletic performance.

Brand lift is a summary of the positive effects your brand has experienced since launching the ad campaign. Organic search traffic and surveys to obtain direct customer feedback both factor in evaluating brand lift.

"Advertising research," "advertisement testing," and "campaign testing" get used interchangeably, but they answer different questions at different points in a campaign.

Advertising research in marketing research is the umbrella: it's how advertising research fits alongside product, pricing, and brand research inside a company's broader research spend. The terms below break down where each one fits.

Don’t start an advertising campaign without doing your research first! Successful brands use research before, during, and after advertising campaigns to ensure positive performance. 

SurveyMonkey offers ad testing solutions for real-time results that confirm your ad effectiveness. We also provide a variety of other market research services. Take a look and get started on your successful, research-backed advertising today!