Marketers Use Surveys to Measure, Track, and Optimize Previously Hard-to-track Channels

Source: Martech Series

Spot Trender, a leader in advertising testing and consumer insights, partnered with Bottle Rocket and Eicoff to launch a research study on customer acquisition and retention. Bottle Rocket is a leading experience consultancy that provides business strategy, product, design, and technology services that drive business resuts and solve unmet needs. Eicoff is a full-service performance advertising agency that leverages the power of television and audio to drive conversion and grow sales. Both organizations are a part of Ogilvy Experience.

Understanding how to measure and better execute on the two fundamental growth drivers of business is what the top brands and agencies in the world do best. With the tectonic shift of focus to digital advertising in the last decade, one of the most interesting themes to come out of the research was that traditional channels still provide excellent ROI and that savvy marketers know how to measure and optimize those channels in a full-funnel acquisition strategy.

“It was an absolute pleasure collaborating with the Bottle Rocket and Eicoff teams. Their expertise in key business drivers and metrics added a lot of depth to our research,” said Rick Nguyen, President and Co-founder at Spot Trender.

The study surveyed 169 marketing leaders (director level or higher) to better understand what Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) businesses are tracking, and how they are tracking them.

According to our survey participants, many of them are unaware of solutions for tracking and optimizing ads for traditional channels like OOH, radio, and TV. For instance, much fewer of them think that they can accurately measure return on investment (ROI) for radio/audio than SEO/SEM and email. Modern advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon Advertising provide dashboards and tracking capabilities, which are helpful to calculate return on ad spend.

Radio, on the other hand, requires an extra step. Advertisers who have been successfully tracking radio ROI are using surveys to understand where their customers came from. These surveys are useful not just to track radio, but other traditional advertising channels, like out-of-home billboards. Instead of just capturing impressions and demographics, world-class advertisers are measuring their ROI and optimizing those creative assets with research firms.

“New customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any growing company. The research echoed the importance of measuring the impact of acquisition campaigns across the entire funnel,” said Rob Schmidt, SVP, Management Supervisor at Eicoff. “Traditional media like TV play a vital role in building awareness and creating demand in the upper funnel, while search, remarketing, and other lower funnel tactics pull these new customers in. Smart marketers know that acquisition campaigns need to be planned, executed, and measured across the full funnel, and they need to mine their data and tap into different resources to measure impact at each stage.”