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Media Coverage
"Drive
Conversions with Online Branding"
iMedia
June
20,
2007
Need to up your campaign's conversions? Online branding
could boost your conversions by 28 percent.
As the two main advertising strategies, branding and direct response are designed to communicate with consumers at different points in the purchase funnel. Whereas branding is an upper funnel strategy intended to raise awareness, recall, favorability, and consideration, direct response advertising is a lower funnel strategy designed to drive a particular action.
In traditional media, assessing the success (and therefore, value) of a brand advertising campaign is largely based on survey responses, which are prone to subjectivity and are therefore generally unquantifiable from an ROI/value perspective. However, because of its ability to address reach and speak to the masses, branding was used as a key upper funnel marketing strategy.
Conversely, the internet's distinct ability to accurately track, measure, and improve campaign response in real time makes it possible to achieve a level of granularity, segmentation, and dynamic audience targeting not seen in traditional offline media. Given the potential to more directly drive revenue over the internet, marketers have overwhelmingly voted in favor of direct response over branding campaigns online. One only need witness the rise of Google and the overall search industry as prime evidence.
But what about online branding? Why have marketers been so reluctant to engage in online brand campaigns? How can they apply the web's distinct advantages to drive a traditionally offline media strategy? It's easier than most people think.
If it can be tracked, it can be measured. If it can be measured, it can be improved.
For online direct response campaigns, marketers improve ROI by first tracking, measuring, and analyzing successful direct responses (a click, a purchase, a newsletter registration, etc.) to determine the data makeup of the different responding customer segments. Next, they optimize the campaign by removing underperforming creative/placements. In more sophisticated next generation platforms, identifying responder segments in real time makes it possible to dynamically serve targeted messages in order to maximize successful responses.
While a branding campaign will almost certainly differ in its creative concept, copy, and placement, the same tracking, measurement, analysis, and improvement methodology can be used to maximize the campaign's success.
As an example, a large online dating site (and client of [x+1]) recently performed an online branding test to assess whether an ad exposure (test cell) vs. non-exposure (control cell) led to an increase in subscriptions. Limiting the definition of subscribers to post-impression (PI) subscribers eliminated those direct responders (i.e. those who clicked the ad) and the following additional subscriber constraints helped to further isolate and refine the value and impact of the ad exposure(s):
- Those who had already been (but no longer were) subscribers and/or had already been to the site in the past.
- Those who were new to the site and who subscribed but who came to the site directly from a search engine, affiliate marketing partner, etc.
- Measuring frequency and time lag of exposures. In other words, how many times and over what time period were the exposures that can be tied to a subscription?
Overall, at the end of the two week test period, those in the test cell who had been exposed to the ads generated 28 percent more subscriptions than those in the control cell who were never exposed. Given the test cell constraints, it was clear the exposure and branding had a positive impact on awareness, consideration, and ultimately, subscriber conversion.
Again, as stated above for direct response campaigns, next generation platforms consisting of sophisticated algorithms and/or statistical modeling capabilities then offer the marketer the ability to improve or optimize their brand campaigns by identifying those email responder segments in real time, then dynamically serving the same messages to replicate the successful branding response.
While there will be a certain percentage of users who regularly clear their cookies (and therefore, appear prime for targeting yet may already possess brand awareness), testing the additional constraints like frequency caps and time lag (as our client did) can isolate the impact of this subset. In addition, testing other branding success metrics (i.e. unique visits per thousand impressions) and employing more traditional qualitative measurements (i.e. brand surveys) across campaigns can help drive more effective and cost-efficient media buys and thus, a higher overall brand campaign ROI.
Conclusion
As the online channel grows and more budgets are dedicated to interactive media, the capability now exists for marketers to achieve their branding objectives online. Doing so will complement direct response campaigns and offer marketers a comprehensive, measurable, and optimizable online communication strategy.
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