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Manjima Khandelwal
Vice President, International Brand Health Services
ACNielsen
Anything new breeds skeptics, and the struggle for acceptance of online advertising has been no different: Why should I include online advertising as a part of my advertising arsenal? Does it really work? Don’t most surfers ignore banner ads and find pop-up ads annoying and distracting?
Marketers are seeking compelling evidence to show that online advertising is an effective business tool. Does it move the branding needle?
Traditional approaches have led marketers to use click-stream interactions as a measure of the online media effectiveness, which links the advertising to immediate consumer action. However, click-through rates do not capture the impact the exposure of the advertisement has on the consumer’s disposition towards the brand and subsequent purchase decision at the offline point of sale.
ACNielsen has developed a breakthrough approach to evaluate the impact of online advertising using a proprietary cookie-based technology that helps identify whether the consumers have been exposed to the advertising as well as their number of exposures. Based on the ACNielsen | Winning Brands™ theoretical framework, we can examine the lift in brand health across the control and exposed groups to diagnose the impact of online advertising.
Exposure to online advertising?
Control Group: No Exposed Group: Yes
The pop-up survey administered to these two groups evaluates brand equity, brand relationships, image and advertising diagnostics and incorporates a virtual shopping exercise. A recently conducted online advertising evaluation for a personal care brand revealed that the ad was effective in strengthening the quality of awareness, familiarity and purchase disposition of the brand. The message association with the key benefit also exhibited a 20% lift.
In addition to diagnosing the impact on brand health measures, the potential purchase lift was forecasted using a virtual shopping exercise. Respondents were exposed to a virtual shelf and asked to make a purchase decision.
The virtual shopping exercise forecasted a 20% lift in brand sales. How did the forecast compare with actual in-market sales? To evaluate the impact in market sales, a parallel test was conducted among ACNielsen | Homescan™ households, to provide us with access to consumer purchase data. A comparison of brand sales across the Control and Exposed Homescan Household groups showed a 24% lift within an error interval of +/- 5%. The Homescan study validated the results of the Virtual Shopping methodology.
The ACNielsen | Winning Brands™ approach when applied to evaluating online advertising effectiveness can provide compelling evidence to marketers increasingly challenged to prove the impact of their marketing spend.
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