Evaluating and measuring your mobile campaigns

Written by Laurie Kirschner, head of insights, Yahoo!

Marketers today are showing an increased interest in using mobile for marketing purposes. Recognising that individuals from hard-to-reach demographic groups are turning to the mobile internet to access information throughout the day, these advertisers are beginning to experiment with this new and largely uncluttered medium.

However, before the mobile internet is fully embraced by advertisers as a legitimate marketing medium, proper evaluation and measurement will be essential. What follows is a brief overview of the challenges faced when evaluating mobile media campaigns and the various forms of mobile media campaign measurement available.

Mobile campaign measurement challenges

The beauty of interactive advertising is its measurability. For years before its inception, media researchers had to contend with softer measures in order to determine the impact of advertising campaigns. Actual exposure could never explicitly be measured. Rather, a determination of OTS or ‘Opportunity to See’ an ad was used and pre-post methodologies employed to evaluate the success of a campaign. By definition, however, interactive advertising is advertising with which consumers can directly interact. Consequently, these behaviours can be directly measured and impact directly quantified, whether by behavioural metrics (such as clickthrough rates and interaction rates) or brand metrics (such as awareness and purchase intent). Mobile media advertising sits under the umbrella of interactive advertising and as such, is afforded the same benefits.

However, there are some unique challenges the mobile marketers face when evaluating their campaigns.

1. Lack of cookies to track exposure. Due to the security risks inherent in targeting individuals on such a personal device as a mobile phone as well as the wealth of data the mobile operators have on each of their subscribers, the use of cookies to track exposure is generally prohibited by most of the mobile network providers. Creative work-arounds, such as passing an ASID (or Anonymous Subscriber ID) through to the research provider in order to identify those who have been exposed to the advertising are often necessary in this space to preserve the ability to track exposure, thus ensuring a clean control-exposed methodology.

2. Diversity in form factor and screen size. The range in screen shapes and sizes means advertisers must produce campaign creative in a multitude of sizes to ensure that their ads appear on each and every device in existence. Without taking all devices into consideration and building their ads to fit on these devices, marketers can miss key segments of the population and evaluation then becomes skewed.

3. Decreasing survey response rates. Getting consumers to respond to survey participation requests via banner ads on their mobile phones is becoming more and more difficult. Initial response rates were quite promising as consumers were curious and intrigued by the novelty. However, as the number of research studies has increased over time, the novelty has worn off and response rates have decreased significantly. Today, brands must utilise vast amounts of inventory in order to meet minimum sample thresholds and come up with creative methods to keep response rates as high as possible.

Forms of campaign evaluation

As in the online environment, making the choice between the different forms of campaign evaluation available is wholly dependent on the objectives of the mobile campaign itself. If the goal is to obtain leads for the advertised brand, drive engagement with your WAP site, or click-to-call to make a purchase, then behavioural response metrics will be essential to measure success. If, on the other hand, the goal is to build brand equity through increasing brand awareness or favourability, or to shift consumers’ perceptions of a brand, then brand impact metrics will be important to collect during the campaign.

Behavioural response measurement

Within the mobile environment, behavioural response measurement primarily consists of reporting on click-through rate (CTR), defined as the number of users who clicked on an ad divided by the number of times the ad was delivered, expressed as a percentage.

Marketers use clickthrough rates to understand the degree to which consumers responded to their ads. However, it is important to remember that the click-through rate of a campaign will never tell the entire story of how exposure to an ad impacted behaviour. This is because CTR does not include people who failed to click on the ad, but arrived at the WAP later, as a result of seeing the ad previously.

Brand impact measurement

When marketers measure the brand impact of a campaign, they can test the following:

• Unaided brand awareness – measures users’ recall of the test brand without prompting

• Aided brand awareness – measures users’ recall of the test brand from a short list provided

• Ad recall/online ad awareness – measures users’ recollection of an ad for the test brand

• Message association – measures users’ recollection of the campaign key messages

• Brand favourability – measures the percentage of users that view the brand positively

• Purchase intent – measures the percentage of users that intend to buy the test brand

Additionally, marketers can measure the change in brand perceptions as a result of exposure to the interactive ad campaign.

To measure any or all of these factors, marketers would employ a control/ exposed methodology. In order to step up this methodology, ideally the mobile environment being used would need to allow for exposure to be tracked and exposed consumers to be identified in some way. If this is possible, then the research would be set-up as follows:

1. Consumers are recruited to take a survey by clicking through on a survey recruitment banner and answering a series of questions about the advertised brand (and the competitive set, to blind the survey).

2. After the campaign is completed, the list of survey respondents is matched to the list of exposed respondents, using a unique identifier. Those respondents who fall on both lists will be identified as exposed respondents and those only falling on the survey respondent list will be used as control respondents.

3. Whilst both groups will be recruited from the same areas where the mobile campaign is running to ensure that they are matched appropriately, additional profiling will be used to ensure this is the case.

4. Once it is determined that the two groups are matched as closely as possible, answers to the questions from the exposed group are compared to those of the control group and any significant differences are attributed to exposure to the mobile ad campaign.

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