As digital marketers, the words “Performance-Based Brand Awareness” feels a little off. Seeing those words in one sentence just doesn’t quite gel-like “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”. That’s because, for the longest time, marketers have either been on one side of the fence or the other.
Kaliber’s team put performance marketing first, which basically means we will always be biased towards the performance-based metrics. On the other hand, we see the value and need for brand awareness to prospect users earlier in the user journey and have come up with our own unique ways of determining the value of brand awareness activity for our clients.
In this article, we will share how we measure the impact of our brand activity beyond the traditional metrics.
Firstly, let’s start with the performance metrics that matter most to advertisers; conversion metrics such as leads and sales. Naturally, most advertisers judge all their campaigns based on these metrics. However, there are many “micro-actions” to consider before a conversion action occurs. These actions may include; time on site, pages visited, add to cart, bookmark, etc.
Why track these metrics? When prospecting new potential customers, not every user begins their purchase journey right away. There is merit and value in users that were not remotely interested that have taken the time to learn about your brand. Other things to track:
Leveraging Observation Audiences. In search can provide you with a lot of insights into the type of audiences that Google supplies that you could potentially target. This is free audience data (technically paying for it) but people are so shy and add audiences that are related to their industry/market/business. Pro tip: Don’t be shy…
ADD ALL THE AUDIENCES. If you are in the heavy machinery industry, add Baby Food. IT DOESN’T MATTER, IT’S FREE! You’d be incredibly surprised at the audience gems we’ve found for our clients.
Set up a REAL Experiment – You need a control group vs a test group. Think Grade 6 Chemistry level Experiment.
Hypothesis of upper-funnel tactics:
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- Conversions: NOPE – if you get conversions, great, but erase that from your mind for a second.
What are the steps that lead up to a Conversion, can we measure those steps? If so, let’s start there when it comes to our Hypothesis.
#1 Hypothesis of upper-funnel tactics
By serving mass impressions and reaching users that are not actively searching, we can expect our upper-funnel tactics to spark interest. To create the need of the user to direct them to conduct more research for a solution that we provide.
Hypothesis #1 would be an increase in CTR and increase in Brand Searches – Hypothesis #1 is what we internally call and measure as “Search Uplift”. By increasing the number of valued actions that occur before a conversion, we expect to be increasing the overall number of conversions
#2 Hypothesis would be an increase in Conversions
Here’s the fun part – In order for your hypothesis to work the way you’re expecting it to, you need a lot of engagement. Which would require a lot of clicks, and require a lot of impressions, and a lot of budget. We’re talking Coca-Cola budget to see the needle move significantly in a short period of time. Let’s face it, we don’t have the patience.
So, here’s our suggestion
Use that valuable data you’ve collected, select ONE age group/gender, in combination with ONE location which will cut your budget for running this experiment by 50x. Don’t hold back. Think Coca-Cola budget scale for your company, but only on a small segment. You need mass impressions, mass clicks to make the needle move.
Congratulations ? , you now have a Real Experiment with a Real Test and Control.
What happens after the experiment?
Assess your options. There’s a lot you can take away with a substantial amount of data concentrated in a single audience layer, allowing you to make bolder assumptions. You can move forward and expand your reach or you can test creatives or a different approach to increase performance.
If you choose to expand, you can double down and launch the same campaign in a new location or with a different audience targeting. This is a part of Kaliber’s “Single Purpose Campaign” framework, which is our performance-based approach to investing in brand activity.
