Are you accurately measuring your ROI on a campaign?
Let’s say you run a campaign and you receive a grand report on the potential Reach, Engagement and Estimated Media Value. Your first question should be “So what?”
You should be asking:
Does this compare better to a previous campaign?
Did we perform better than a similar competitor’s campaign?
Has this made a positive impact on our overall brand performance?
Did this help us to increase our share of voice (SOV) against our closest competitors (the market)?
Most important of all, if you answer “yes” to all the above, then you should see a positive ROI and more than likely an increase in sales.
To add to this, a successful campaign is usually one which creates additional noise outside the expected and paid for investments.
“It is those unexpected and organic messages that really add value and increase your SOV”
Let’s say you don’t have access to the above, then it is of the utmost importance that you be critical. This means questioning your own biases, distrusting your intuition, and displaying a healthy degree of scepticism when presented with reports and figures. There is no easy way of measuring success, a deeper look is always necessary to really understand the underlying drivers of the figures.
We all know that there is a tendency to exaggerate figures so the kind of things to look at are:
Online content figures showing monthly unique visitors are often highly exaggerated and bear very little resemblance to the possible viewers.
How do you measure Influencer engagement and value for Instagram Stories where very little metrics are available?
Did you get a decent engagement rate from a paid influencer…maybe below average?
Was the value of your print coverage accurately measured e.g. Maybe it was just ¼ page
Ellen Warfield
Specialist in Media Evaluation