How to Evaluate Your Media Buy
7 Minute Read
Your digital and traditional campaigns are running, and you have specific objectives you want your ads to meet. If you don’t know how to evaluate your media buy, you won’t be able to accurately measure the effectiveness of your advertising.
You can’t just crank out an ad campaign and pat yourself on the back. You need real results. At Twelve Three Media, we know that planning and executing ad campaigns represent only the first part of successful media buying. To fully understand whether your media buys are driving business or wasting money, you need to dive into specific KPIs to determine (a) how well each campaign helped you meet your goals and (b) the return on investment.
Analyzing data isn’t some dark mystery; you just have to know exactly what to keep an eye on. Below, we share the specific metrics you should be looking at for a variety of campaigns to evaluate the success of your media buying strategy.
How to Evaluate Your Connected TV & OTT Ad Buy
Advertising opportunities for connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) represent the “new frontier” in the digital realm for advertisers accustomed to television. We’ve written before about the differences between connected TV and OTT and how to design campaigns for these separate (but related) mediums.
Connected TV and OTT are primarily avenues for awareness (top of the funnel), but there are also ways to try to drive conversions (bottom of the funnel). These include campaign-specific phone numbers, URLs with tracking codes, etc.
Metrics you need to consult when evaluating the effectiveness of connected TV and OTT buys include:
Completed Video Views
Some CTV and OTT platforms have unskippable ad breaks, while others allow viewers to skip ads after a few seconds. If the platform lets viewers skip ads, completed video views is the best metric for determining engagement and whether your ads are supporting your awareness goals.
Ad Placement
Knowing where your ads run is an important component of evaluating the success of your buy. Pulling placement reports is key for optimizing the campaign, as the report will show where each impression is served. You can start to exclude placements with low engagement rates or that run in lower quality inventory.
Unique Video Views
Reach measures the number of people who have seen an ad one or more times within a given time period. Unique video views measure how many viewers were exposed to your OTT or CTV content in the course of the campaign. This enables you to measure the reach of your ads.
How to Evaluate Your PPC Ad Buy
Pay-per-click advertising is a type of direct response campaign. It leverages consumer search behaviors to try to drive conversions (such as sales, phone calls, form fills, signups, etc.).
When it comes to how to evaluate your media buy for PPC, there is one key metric to assess:
Quantity of Conversions
PPC campaigns live or die on the number of conversions they drive. What constitutes a conversion depends on the campaign objective, the type of business, and what types of actions support your business goals:
- Service-based campaigns optimize for conversions that measure contact from customers or clients.
- Chats
- Completed forms
- Calls
- E-commerce campaigns optimize for conversions that measure purchases and/or ROAS (return on ad spend).
How to Evaluate Your Video Ad Buy
Video ads can run on Google Ads Exchange, social media platforms, and a host of additional channels. The majority of video ads focus on driving awareness/engaging top-of-funnel consumers, but they can also support mid-funnel/consideration campaigns with additional targeting.
Obviously, you need high-quality videos to achieve maximum success with your video ads. Key metrics for evaluating the performance of video ad campaigns include:
Completed Video Views
More than 65% of consumers report skipping video ads when given the chance. Completed video views are a very good way of evaluating the effectiveness of your ads because watching the video to completion signals that these viewers are interested in your offering and/or business.
Unique Video Views
The unique video views on your ads are a measure of reach. It signifies the size of the audience who is served an ad, thus helping advertisers measure the effectiveness of their awareness and consideration campaigns.
Read More: 10 Ways to Incorporate Videos Into Your Marketing
How to Evaluate Your Local Services Ads Buy
Google Local Services Ads are a powerful way for advertisers across multiple industries to reach customers through search.
Local Services Ads (LSAs) include a unique phone number that syncs up with your business phone line. This presents a uniquely direct approach for how to evaluate your media buy on Google Local Services Ads.
Quantity of Calls
Ultimately, the success or failure of a Local Services Ads campaign comes down to phone calls. Advertisers need to be diligent about logging in to the LSA Dashboard, seeing how many calls they’re getting from the LSAs, and listening to the calls in the dashboard as soon as you can after they come in. You will then want to assign the call as a lead in the dashboard or archive the call if it is not relevant.
Relevant Calls
In addition to the number of calls, you need to ensure that the calls you’re getting align with your offering and goals. Google Local Services Ads are billed on a cost per lead basis, and you have the option of marking specific calls as “not a lead” within the LSA Dashboard. If you’re seeing a lot of irrelevant calls, however, it’s time to think about making adjustments so you can reach the right customers.
Read More: How to Optimize Google Local Services Ads
Duration of Calls
The longer the call, the more relevant the inquiry is to your business (probably). Peruse the list of leads in the LSA Dashboard to see how long the calls from LSAs typically last. If you see a lot of short calls, your Local Services Ads might not be hitting the mark.
How to Evaluate Your Social Media Ad Buy
With social media marketing, the desired action should always align with your business objective. Advertisers can reach countless different goals through social media ads, from growing their followers to fostering engagement to driving leads and sales.
How you evaluate the success of social media advertising depends on your goals. Potential metrics to review include:
Reach
Reach measures the total number of people who have seen an ad during the campaign. The social media platform dashboard will give you this information.
Completed Video Views
The number of times a video ad is viewed to the end indicates how many social media users are interested in your brand or offering. It can also help you measure the effectiveness of videos, which may be used across multiple digital marketing channels.
Likes, Comments, Shares, & Saves
Engagement metrics depend on the platform. We commonly drive engagement by encouraging people to like and comment on an ad for a chance to win a giveaway. This gives users an incentive for engaging with your ad and/or page.
Purchases and/or ROAS
Sales are the KPI for e-commerce brands advertising on social media. In addition to purchases, you want to look at return on ad spend to confirm that you’re spending your advertising budget wisely.
Lead Generation
For service-based businesses, lead gen ads are the best means of targeting social media consumers at the bottom of the funnel. An example of a lead would be a user entering their name, email, and phone number. Pay attention to cost per acquisition so you’re not overspending to generate leads.
How to Evaluate Your Radio Ad Buy
Radio, TV, and other traditional media are still viable verticals for reaching consumers. As an advertiser, however, you need to know how to evaluate your media buy on traditional channels in order to overcome some of the difficulties in measuring campaigns.
Reach
Whether you advertise on traditional and/or digital channels, reach measures the number of unique people exposed to an ad over the course of a campaign. In the case of radio ads, it refers to the number of listeners who hear your ad during the campaign timeframe.
Frequency
You also need to measure the number of times the audience hears your ads. Hearing an ad once or twice might not be enough to drive an action, but repeat exposure can influence behavior—provided the ad isn’t overexposed, which can result in fatigue and lack of interest.
How to Evaluate Your TV Ad Buy
KPIs are broadly the same for TV ads as they are for radio.
Advertisers who make use of TV advertisements need to measure the effectiveness of their ads in terms of:
Reach
On TV, reach measures the overall size of the audience that sees your ad. The more programs or channels your ad runs on and the more desirable the airtime, the bigger your reach will be.
Frequency
The frequency of a TV ad indicates how often an individual sees the same ad during a marketing campaign. As with radio ads, it is important not to under- or oversaturate the TV audience.
For TV and radio, there are a few ways to measure reach and frequency for advertisements:
- How often an ad runs during peak viewing or listening hours (dayparting)
- Increase in desired activity (example: more customers taking advantage of a special restaurant offer during the times the ad is running)
- Calls to a tracking number associated with the campaign
- Visits to your website via a tracking URL for the campaign
Read More: What Is Ad Frequency? (and Why You Should Care)
Need Help Evaluating Your Media Buy? Contact Twelve Three Media!
Measuring and validating results can be one of the challenging aspects of any ad campaign. We hope you’ve found this information helpful, but recognize that you may still have questions about how to evaluate your media buy and take your advertising to the next level.
The ad experts at Twelve Three Media can help you plan a killer media strategy, implement campaigns across multiple traditional and digital channels, and measure the results. Our mission is the same as yours: to meet your objectives and grow your business.