What is advertising effectiveness? Insights from marketers

While more consumers are spending time on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, TV is not a dying advertising medium. 

40% of people say they’ve seen advertising they trusted on TV. Based on research from Statista, TV ranks as the most trusted medium out of the ten surveyed — with consumers placing nearly the amount of trust in TV ads as they do in social media.

But how do you create successful ads? And how do you measure their effectiveness?

As a since-deleted Reddit user notes, the answers to these questions aren’t clear cut: 

“All sorts of different objectives and metrics used and consistent debate about which ones are the best, most accurate, most useful.”

In this post, I’ll show you how to measure the effectiveness of your advertising, take a critical look at the most commonly-used metrics and walk you through our tried-and-tested advertising effectiveness formula.

“Every single element in an advertisement – headline, subhead, photo, and copy – must be put there not because it looks good, not because it sounds good, but because testing has shown that it works best!”

– John Caples

Advertising effectiveness measures the performance of an ad compared to the campaign’s goals. Some of the goals advertising effectiveness impacts include relevance, audience sentiment and brand awareness. 

For many brands, effective ads are ads that directly impact ROI and lead to net new sales and thousands of online brand mentions. While the majority of companies also track long-term, hard-to-pin-down metrics such as brand awareness and likability. 

Ad effectiveness formulas essentially answer the question: Are my ads doing what I want them to do? They help you identify whether your ads have hit the metrics you intended after they’ve aired. 

Measuring advertising effectiveness is crucial for brands and businesses that want to optimize their marketing strategies and achieve a significant ROI. 

By evaluating how well advertising campaigns perform, companies can identify which elements resonate most with their target consumer, allowing them to optimize their messages and improve future campaigns. 

Without these consumer insights, businesses risk wasting resources on ineffective advertising and missing out on potential customer engagement. And in a competitive market, understanding what works and what doesn't is critical for maintaining an edge.

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

- David Ogilvy

As ads appeal to human psychology, many of the concepts we use to measure ad effectiveness could be described as “fluffy,” difficult to quantify and nuanced. Notions such as how likable a brand is or how much trust we have in a product may be difficult to measure because they depend on human emotion, bias and impulse. However, there is a formula and a step-by-step process you can follow to bring a bit of scientific accuracy to the creative process. 

Advertising effectiveness formula

Pilot Media Inc. senior researcher Adam S. Cook developed a formula for measuring advertising effectiveness with a single numerical value. He calls it the OB-AEI. 

It takes into account metrics like ad recall and desired outcome (for example, sales) to come up with an index that can be used to compare the effectiveness of one ad to another.

It looks complicated on the surface, but its parts are simple: conduct a survey with a representative sample, pull your sales numbers, and crunch the numbers. But, if you’re just getting started with your very first ad campaign, you might find the manual method below more helpful.

Here’s some steps to keep in mind when collecting active or passive data for measuring advertising effectiveness:

Step 1: Define your objectives

Identify goals and objectives. Determine what you want to learn from your audience, such as brand perception, message clarity or purchase intent. Now is also the time to establish what success looks like, whether it's a percentage of positive feedback or a specific conversion rate.

Step 2: Choose your metrics

The second step to measuring your ad effectiveness is to choose the metrics of success for your ads. Your goals or metrics guide the course of your research, giving your ads a clear bar to hit. 

These might include likability, salience and brand awareness. You can use one or a combination of these metrics and the tools and strategies for measuring them to assess the impact of your ads. 

Step 3: Choose your method

1. Active data: Use surveys, polls and feedback forms to gather direct responses from your audience.

2. Passive data: Use digital analytics tools to track behavior metrics like CTR, conversion rates, website traffic and social media engagement.

Salience is one of the most common measures of brand effectiveness. Salience refers to how likely a brand or product is to come to mind when a consumer goes to buy something. 

Reddit user Chitownurbex says: 

“When it comes to brand-building, or as some say long-term effects, it often gets measured by salience (how easy it is to think of a brand).”

They note that one of the best ways to measure brand salience is to survey people about their product knowledge and brand awareness before and after a campaign and measure any potential increase. 

Reddit user d_lan88 adds:

“Other useful indicators are things like consumer studies to measure consideration, salience over years etc. Is your brand recognizable, are the colors memorable relative to your competitor set?”

Use Zappi’s predefined, UX-optimized surveys to measure these factors before and after your ads air. Be sure to use best practices such as: 

1. Open-ended questions – Use open-ended questions to avoid influencing respondents’ answers and to motivate them to share more about their sentiments and perceptions.

2. Short surveys — Keep surveys under ten minutes to reduce dropout rates.

3. Simple survey designs — Keep your survey designs simple and easy to navigate to encourage users to complete the survey. 

Step 4: Design your survey questions

Concrete questions are the most straightforward place to start your ad measurement process. 

Below are a few data question tips to get you started:

1. Be specific: Ask clear, concise questions that directly relate to your objectives.

2. Mix question types: Use multiple-choice, ratings and open-ended questions.

3. Avoid bias: Ensure questions are neutral to avoid leading respondents to a particular answer.

Passive data setup:

• Analytics tools: Set up tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights or HubSpot to track relevant metrics.

• Event tracking: Implement tracking for specific actions such as clicks, form submissions and page views.

• Tagging and segmentation: Use UTM codes and segment audiences to analyze behavior more accurately.

Effective ads don’t always bring about immediate, concrete results such as a same-day increase in new sales. In order to measure the impact of your ads on important metrics like brand awareness and brand recall, you’ll also need to factor in proxy metrics. Proxy metrics are data points that can help you measure variables that are hard to measure directly. 

Social media mentions are a great example of a proxy metric you can use to assess whether your TV ads have increased brand awareness with consumers. 

Social media mentions refer to any time a consumer mentions your brand online. Positive brand mentions highlight brand awareness and point to higher levels of brand trust and credibility.

Use a social listening tool like Sprout Social to track how many brand mentions you’re getting online across social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. 

Step 5: Distribute to the right audience and track behavior

Active data distribution:

• Targeted sampling: Send surveys or polls to a segment of your audience to expose them to the ad.

• Incentivize participation: In some instances, offer incentives like discounts, free trials or entry into a giveaway.

Passive data tracking:

• Monitor metrics: Regularly check metrics like CTR, conversion rates, bounce rates and time on site.

• A/B testing: Conduct A/B tests to compare different versions of ads and measure which performs better.

Step 6: Collect and organize responses and data

“As trust is more complex than other emotions, it is harder to measure at one point in time at the individual level. It is something that tends to be in flux, either helped or eroded over time. It will be slightly influenced on the emotional side, but there will be a lot of thought processes involved trying to find reasons why a product is trustworthy or not.” - Tom Anderson, Customer Think

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, brand trust is the second most important reason consumers buy a product — beaten out narrowly by price.

One of the best ways to measure consumer trust is to use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. The NPS tracks the trust built in your brand by asking respondents how likely they are to recommend your brand to a friend — giving you a ranking from one to ten. 

Based on their responses, respondents are placed in one of three categories:

1. Promoters: Promoters give your brand a score from 9-10. They have a positive view of your brand. They’re most likely to be repeat buyers and recommend your brand to friends. 

2. Passives: Passives rank your brand an 8 or 7. These respondents are relatively happy with your brand. They show medium levels of trust and loyalty, but are open to switching to another competitor. They don’t go out of their way to recommend you to a friend. 

3.  Detractors: These respondents give your brand a score of 0-6. These are consumers who are unhappy with your brand and openly share their dislike on social media or with friends and family. 

Before you run your ad, use a benchmark survey to measure your NPS score. Following the launch of your ad, repeat the survey to see if there’s an increase in your score. 

Active data collection:

• Track responses: Monitor the number of responses and ensure they represent a significant portion of your target audience.

• Automate where possible: Use tools that compile and organize responses automatically.

Passive data collection:

• Dashboard monitoring: Use dashboards to keep an eye on real-time data.

• Export data: Regularly export data for deeper analysis if needed.

Step 7: Analyze the data

“When brands test ads and don’t even store their data in any platform or system, insights are obtained on a one-off basis. When that data doesn’t get integrated into a broader ecosystem, the focus is only on the point-in-time impact.”

- Nataly Kelly, CMO, Zappi

To get a full picture of ad performance, you’ll need to integrate your platforms and data. 

Use all-in-one research or consumer insights platforms like Zappi to centralize and keep track of all your ad and consumer insights. 

Also look into tools and platforms that offer integrations with the other platforms you use. These tools make it easy to share ad and consumer data across disparate systems. 

Take social media management platform Sprout Social. Beyond integrating with all of the main social media platforms, Sprout also integrates with workflow tools like Dropbox and Google Drive and web tracking tools like Google Analytics.

Before you can derive insights from your data, you’ll need to profile, cleanse, and repair your it — sorting out any mistakes, duplications, or missing information. For more guidance on how to do this, check out our post on the problem with data quality in advertising insights. 

Once you’ve moved through the above steps, you can analyze your data for trends, themes and interesting insights. 

Active data analysis:

• Quantitative analysis: Identify trends in numerical data and measure against your defined metrics.

• Qualitative analysis: Review open-ended responses for common themes and insights.

• Compare and contrast: See how different segments of your audience responded to identify specific areas for improvement.

Passive data analysis:

• Behavioral insights: Look at metrics like CTR, conversion rates and bounce rates to understand user behavior.

• Trend analysis: Identify patterns and trends over time to see how your campaigns are performing.

• Segment analysis: Analyze data by segments to understand how different groups are interacting with your ads.

Step 8: Take Action

• Adjust campaigns: Use the insights gained to tweak your current ad campaigns for better effectiveness.

• Inform future strategies: Apply what you’ve learned to future advertising efforts to continuously improve performance.

• Iterate and test: Continuously test new approaches based on data insights to refine your strategies.

Step 9: Communicate findings

• Share with stakeholders: Present the findings to your team and other stakeholders in a clear, concise manner.

• Document learnings: Keep a record of insights and actions taken for future reference and continuous improvement.

Let’s take a look at how some brands have measured advertising effectiveness and how they are applying advertising effectiveness learnings.

Cheetos: Creative testing with Zappi Amplify TV 

With tools like Zappi, you don’t have to wait until your ad goes live to measure its effectiveness. You can (and should) measure ad effectiveness in the development stage by testing different variations of your ad. 

Cheetos used Zappi Amplify TV to test different variations of their award-winning Super Bowl ad featuring their new product: Cheetos Popcorn mix. 

Read our customer story snippet below to see how Cheetos used Zappi Amplify TV for early-stage ad variation testing — highlighting the ads potential effectiveness: 

“The Cheetos team opted to work with American rapper MC Hammer and used his iconic phrase "can't touch this." 

The ad would feature a series of vignettes of a man unable to touch anything because of the Cheetos dust on his fingers. They developed four alternative animatic ads to test out a few different ways of bringing the story to life.

They experimented with different creative elements and vignettes to find the right balance of humor, relevance and absurdity to resonate and make the ad stand out.

Two key metrics showed the overall potential of the idea for success. The four ads came in the top third of all ads tested for their ability to drive immediate sales, and their potential to drive longer term impact on the Cheetos brand was even more incredible.”

Through their tests with Amplify, Cheetos quickly identified a clear winner in terms of engagement, humor, cultural sensitivity and ad appreciation. They then used Amplify to analyze viewer sentiment in greater detail — tracking emoji responses to different sections of the ad and leaning into the ads more humorous and emotive creative elements. 

Coca-Cola: Build effective cross-media campaigns 

You can use ad effectiveness insights to understand how TV ads drive consumers' digital behaviors, from social media mentions to app downloads. In doing so, you can understand how TV ads work with your other advertising channels — giving you a look at their combined impact on your campaigns. 

Research shows that cross-media campaigns, in which ads are shown across TV, internet and mobile, have a bigger impact on message, ad and brand credibility than those shared on just one platform. 

You can use these insights to improve your TV and digital synergy by including a unique CTA to a targeted landing page or using ad retargeting directed towards consumers who've watched your ads online.

A great example of this is Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign. This campaign featured both TV and social media ads, promoting personalized coke bottles for coke fans to share with their friends and family. 

The hashtag #ShareaCoke sparked the creation of millions of pieces of user-generated content as consumers shared pictures of themselves with friends and family drinking from their personalized coke bottles across social media. The multi-media campaign led to an 11% increase in sales. 

If you’re looking to gain a greater understanding of how your target consumer thinks and feels about your brand, product or service, Zappi’s Amplify ad system is a fantastic solution. 

Offering much more than another ad pre-testing solution, Zappi Amplify ad system is the only agile market research platform that creates a learning loop, making you smarter the more you use it. By researching your ads early on in the development process with Zappi, you’ll get the insights you need to make it better, and then use all the insights you’ve collected over time to make your future ad campaigns even more successful with the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

With second-by-second emotional responses, in-context and forced exposure, system 1 emojis and AI-based theming for likes, dislikes and distinctive brand assets, our ad system helps you dive even deeper into consumer behavior to optimize your ads for success. 

“Since partnering with Zappi, we have seen our creative effectiveness improve by almost a third across all our advertising. This equates to PepsiCo gaining hundreds of millions in value from greater creative effectiveness this year!”

- Stephen Gans, SVP chief consumer insights and analytics officer, Pepsico

And because our learning loop makes it that much easier to research early and often, you’re able to optimize faster, validate better and leverage systematic learnings to seamlessly create more effective advertising. 

If you’d like to learn more, check out how Zappi helped PepsiCo improve their creative effectiveness by 30% below. Or if you’d like to talk to us about the Amplify ad system, reach out to us.

While there is a ton of debate around the best ways to measure ad effectiveness — you can test the power of your ads by combining several metrics that are most important to your brand and tracking them over time. To give your ad campaigns the best chance of succeeding, it’s important to also test them with consumers during the development phase, through to production.