The method one company uses to measure the effectiveness of its advertisements is highly likely to differ from the way another company measures its advertising effectiveness. Even within the same company, the method you use to measure one campaign should differ from the method you use on another campaign with a different objective.
Measuring ad performance and results across multiple channels is critical for improving future marketing strategies and maximizing the return on your advertising investment. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Too often, companies use the same metrics and KPIs to measure advertising effectiveness across various campaigns, devices and media channels.
The challenges in the measurement process stem from finding the right tools, metrics and formulas that are most effective at measuring true business impact and most applicable to each marketing platform, device, and objective. Especially in the pharmaceutical industry, strict rules and regulations, data privacy concerns, inapplicable or ineffective KPIs, and digital metrics exclusive to the industry are stymying measurement capabilities.
Is the ultimate marketing objective to increase brand awareness, launch a new product, gain more social media followers, increase ad reach, improve ROI, optimize sales per region, or minimize cost per new customer?
The best way to approach measurement is by connecting all marketing efforts to ROI. It’s intuitive, really. Connecting your marketing efforts and individual market goals to the overarching purpose (maximizing ROI) ensures fewer inefficiencies in terms of redundant or ineffectual efforts.
To successfully align marketing efforts with ROI, marketers should look at measuring media effectiveness through a segmented, probabilistic approach.
Shifting to a relatively old-school probabilistic concept that has been infused with new AI and machine learning techniques that are applied to vast data sets means rethinking the engrained digital ethos of deterministic tracking that relies on individual experiences.
Through statistical analysis, marketers can examine and determine patterns in data to drive audience insights that are more indicative of true conversions than deterministic metrics. At the same time, marketers should continue to implement deterministic measurement approaches when possible, as deterministic measurement will provide insight into audience behavior and validation of the probabilistic models that will be important over time.
Until fairly recently, most marketing companies have taken a basic approach to measurement metrics: page impressions, reach, click-through rates (CTR), open rates—they aren’t too predictive of actual conversions. Though these relatively primitive metrics have their place somewhere, the technologically-adept pharmaceutical industry isn’t one of them anymore.
It’s difficult to gain the full picture of the target audience’s journey, behaviors and motives when you’re using measurement metrics that only brush the surface of audience insights.
Technological advancements have facilitated a much more effective way to measure and predict conversions and key site actions. Present day technology makes it possible to understand audience behaviors in ways that past marketers had only dreamed of.
Challenges of Measuring Advertising Effectiveness
Possibly the greatest challenge to measuring advertising effectiveness is that there’s no one correct solution. Effective measurement requires a strategic mix of resources and media tactics to develop a full picture of the ad campaign’s performance.
The digital metrics most often used for e-Commerce marketing don’t necessarily translate to pharmaceutical marketing. Not only are there a number of key stakeholders and different target audiences to consider when deriving insights, but the pharmaceutical industry lags behind other industries, due to heavy rules and regulations that limit tracking capabilities.
From the start, pharma marketers have run into challenges tying media exposures to prescriptions. Strict HIPAA regulations have hindered the use of cookies to track consumer behaviors and access insights related to the consumer’s personal information. Ongoing privacy legislation (GDPR/CCPA) is also changing what can be tracked and shared, disrupting some of the built-in processes currently used by the ad industry.
Walled Gardens make it nearly impossible to access certain analytics, and cross-device tracking has become more critical than ever in a world where the average American has access to more than 10 connected devices in their household.
These limitations have forced marketers to turn to 3rd party, HIPAA-compliant companies to measure advertising effectiveness. Though this is a relatively effective solution, it’s not an efficient solution in terms of budget. Resorting to costly 3rd party companies isn’t conducive to overall ROI.
On the other hand, ad data that is legally accessible may not be applicable to marketing objectives. There are an overwhelming amount of KPIs in digital marketing. A lot of these KPIs are determined by the technology’s capability, not the audiences’ needs or interests, and therefore do not align with the genuine audience journey.
Measuring KPIs that don’t support marketing goals is (more or less) useless. Data surrounding website traffic, impressions, and reach don’t necessarily conclude whether a purchase was made or the purpose of the marketing campaign was fulfilled.
These KPIs determine whether the media channel was used, the email was opened, or the social media campaign received engagement. They speak to campaign effectiveness in a general, one-size-fits-all sense. But in reality, one size does not fit all. The methods used for measurement should be carefully chosen based on a number of variables unique to the industry, the campaign objective, and the company.
The Key to Measuring Advertising Effectiveness
To gain an accurate “big picture” when measuring marketing campaign effectiveness, marketers must see through a segmented, probabilistic lens, building out new data frameworks that employ statistical modeling and AI.
Marketers are frequently forced to adjust their advertising strategy to meet changing demands and regulations. Developing a number of data frameworks can be wildly effective for connecting marketing efforts with ROI and choosing metrics that apply to marketing goals.
Through collaboration with 3rd party measurement partners, marketers have the ability to use a deterministic method that validates a probabilistic approach. Thoughtful integration of statistical modeling and AI can effectively reshape measurement solutions and help companies to navigate privacy concerns, regulations and limitations across the pharmaceutical industry.
Shifting from a deterministic approach to a more probabilistic approach means focusing on metrics that can enable the company to effectively predict and influence future audience behaviors.
Determining the Right Metrics
Marketers must first identify the marketing goals to pinpoint the specific metrics that provide valuable insights to drive the end goal.
End-to-end metrics are significantly beneficial for tracking the audience’s behavior, based on their user journey. Analyzing what the user does next and which actions they take on your campaign or landing page helps marketers to measure the impact of the interaction to determine the true effectiveness of the campaign, far beyond the general ‘reach’ or ‘impression’.
Building Out New Data Frameworks
To achieve the end ROI goal, marketers can build out data frameworks segmented by demographics, geographics, and behaviors. These ‘like-minded’ segments deviate from irrational, unrelated individual experiences and turn toward predictable segments that respond to similar messaging and presentation. Then pairing this with media plans using purposeful changes in budgets, channel mix, and messaging in previously identified segments will provide data scientists the variance in data needed to run better analyses. Conceptually, it would be an elaborate type of ongoing, matched-market testing.
This segmented approach, made possible through a number of strategic data frameworks, will be more clearly tied to specific ROI-driving tactics than general measurement metrics.
Moving the needle from ineffective measurement methods to an effective approach that connects all advertising efforts to the end ROI is undeniably a challenging undertaking. This transformation is absolutely critical for any company striving to increase their sales, improve their return, and stay relevant in a cluttered ecosystem.
This need for change should be seen as an opportunity to reevaluate the current approach and explore new paths for successful measurement. While probabilistic methods that employ advanced technology should be the predominant method for driving performance insights, traditional deterministic methods still have their place in a rewarding measurement strategy.
How Good Apple Can Help
The process of measuring advertising effectiveness is becoming more complex by the day. As new devices enter the market, new media channels are emerging at a parallel rate, which means new marketing metrics are also in tow. Using Google Analytics or Facebook Insights as your sole campaign measurement tactic only addresses the tip of the metric-iceberg.
We help pharmaceutical companies to devise an effective measurement strategy, pinpointing the specific KPIs that support your individual marketing objectives. If you aren’t measuring the individual KPIs that drive your ROI, you may be measuring dead-end metrics that won’t benefit your future campaigns.
Your brand needs an agency with years of experience navigating the heavily-regulated pharmaceutical industry. We have a thorough understanding of HIPAA regulations and privacy limitations to ensure that your marketing communications are compliant.
During the marketing research phase for each campaign, we factor in the ad performance results from previous campaigns, using those insights to improve our strategy. Our experts are continually improving our approach to take full advantage of exclusive performance data and marketing data that aid segmented modeling processes.
We start by discussing your goals, then we work to identify individual paid marketing channels to fulfill the desired results. Between PPC advertising, Google Adwords, social media advertising, programmatic buying, conference targeting, EMR and OOH, we cover all of the bases, using our past successes to drive future marketing decisions.
We use advanced media targeting technology that enables us to hone in your target audience through a highly targeted lens across all digital ad channels. Each channel that comprises an effective measurement strategy requires strategic market research, using advanced, third-party data tools, to draw media consumption insights.
Take your media campaigns to the next level -partner with an agency that knows what they’re doing. As an agency founded in 2008, we’ve seen it all and continuously achieved the results clients are looking for.
