If you know the viewing habits of your consumers, you can achieve higher ROI through advertising. The number of channels has exponentially multiplied and the shrinking budgets in a pandemic environment has put a lot of pressure on brand marketers to maximize ROI. As budgets shift from traditional media to digital media platforms, brand marketers need to optimize their advertising ROI.

The impact of advertising is bigger when there is better understanding of what consumers want to know and what they perceive of your brand after seeing an ad. By its nature, advertising will always be both an art and a science. The introduction of some much-needed empirical evidence into the effectiveness of advertising can help optimize budgets. Here’s how:

1. Evaluate the early ad concept and finished creative

One undeniable fact is that creativity does matter, and it has the power to influence a consumer’s purchase behavior. In the current scenario when consumers are more observant of how brands behave and communicate, it is inevitable to measure the extent to which an ad contains brand elements that are different, novel, unusual, original, unique, etc. This is the first and foremost step to optimize advertising ROI.

2. Pre-test all ad types across multiple platforms

In the new abnormal, there is a clear challenge for advertisers & brands. The combination of increasing clutter, decreasing attention spans, and the rise of multi-tasking as well as consumers’ need for control means effective advertising must first break through before it can engage and motivate. In a multi-platform world, it is important to assess how much of a direct or indirect response the ad is likely to generate, for example using marketing mix modelling.

3. Address the attention and retention challenge

In the digital age, cross-platform advertising is essential and thus it is important to measure the degree to which an ad will actively grab viewer attention across platforms. What this means for brand marketers is two factors:

• Content needs to be produced at a much more frequent pace in attempt to grab shifting consumer attention; and
• It needs to be produced so that it can be seamlessly deployed in a variety of media-platforms.

4. Understand how screen size can impact ad performance

For marketers, it’s critical to evaluate how much of a lasting impression an ad leaves on the consumer. In the advent of COVID-19, in-home entertainment has resulted in increased media consumption. While TV viewership has climbed, digital consumption has increased even more owing to social platforms and streaming services. This makes it even less likely that consumers devote attention to adverts on TV than smartphone or laptop. Therefore, in order to optimize advertising ROI, it is vital to ensure that advertisements migrate well across screen sizes.

5. Diagnose your video and digital banner ads 

Today, marketers are re-thinking content optimization or testing that can be enabled by automation. This significantly increases the speed and reduces cost with deeper diagnosis of whether the content of an ad has strong emotional hook, while being intriguing and persuasive without relying on hype. Also, for moving images (TV and online), it allows marketers to optimize creation or helps determine the crucial scenes for a shorter version of the film.

Ad Fit to optimize your advertising ROI

For complete campaign optimization, brand marketers need to evaluate the impact on ad recall and branding, assess the emotional imprint and measure the actions the ad triggers. Whether it’s mimicking a YouTube-like experience or scrolling behavior on Facebook or banner display advertising, GfK Ad Fit Optimizer has been designed to accelerate and optimize your digital ad spend and overall campaign ROI by assessing the performance of your ads prior to campaign launch.

Accelerate and optimize your advertising ROI