Following advertisers’ footprints
News UK’s Sean Adams tells Newsline how a groundbreaking new research project has allowed the publisher to track the footprint of advertising effects both online and offline.
There’s no question that the Internet has changed the way that we measure advertising. But the apparently endless ways in which one can track and quantify the behaviour of consumers online can give a false impression of us having complete understanding.
In truth, the view that online analysis gives us is only partial. Because digital advertising is digital it is natural to focus on its impact in the digital sphere. However, whilst digital often dominates our thoughts, the real world of things and people continues to exist.
This got us thinking – how can we measure the broader impact of our advertising? How can we track the broadest footprint of advertising effects both online and offline?
But as with many a simple question the answer to this was far more complex than we might have imagined. We needed a different approach. A more holistic approach. Out of this requirement, Project Footprint was conceived.
To achieve our objective, we established a world-first collaboration between online measurement specialist comScore and Word of Mouth consultancy Keller Fay.
Between us we developed a unique research methodology to help us gain a deeper understanding of advertising’s real world impact.
To start with, we recruited a panel of multi-platform Times subscribers and invited them to take part in a month long study which took place in November 2014.
We then tracked their behaviour in two ways.
We tracked their complete online behaviour via comScore’s passive tracking meters which every respondent downloaded at the project registration stage.
We also tracked their offline behaviour via a daily diary app, developed in collaboration with Keller Fay, which captured their word of mouth conversations and other significant offline activities and brand decisions.
Our panel of 70 readers generated a huge amount of data over the month. In total we collected 1.3 million rows of data, including over 180,000 web pages, 44,000 search interactions and 1400 word-of-mouth brand mentions.
All this data, gathered from diverse sources, had to be combined at an individual respondent level, allowing us to build it out and look for patterns in the data.
Crunching the numbers took a while but, once completed, helped us identify four main ways in which the advertising they were exposed to was influencing different outcomes:
Brand advocacy
Brand advocacy is the holy grail of marketing. A brand speaking to a consumer is one thing, but a consumer recommending a brand is quite another. It was therefore encouraging that our research uncovered unexpectedly high levels of correlation between brand advocacy and advertising exposure.
We looked at the proportion of brand advocates within different product categories who had been exposed to advertising for that same brand during the preceding month.
The correlations were as high as 95% in the supermarket sector, with other categories also returning high scores; for instance, Cars 65%, Airlines 75% and Finance 86%.
Whether advertising drives advocacy or advocacy primes advertising receptivity, the relationship between the two factors was extremely high.
Conversation levels
We also tracked how exposure to a brand’s advertising drove conversations about that brand. Other recent UK studies have indicated that some 20-30% of word of mouth is driven by paid media, so we already know that a strong relationship exists.
Again, we saw a significant uplift in brand conversations amongst those who were exposed to specific ads. For instance, readers who saw a Burberry ad were 150% more likely to talk about the brand than those who didn’t. We also saw significant uplifts for a number of other diverse brands including Barclays (+36%), VW (+67%), John Lewis (+16%) and even the movie Mr Turner (114%) which was screening at the time.
Online behaviour
More measurably, we also tracked how ad exposure drove online behaviour. Clearly this is a metric that can already be measured using established tools, but we wanted to create a broader picture of how the relationship between ad exposure and online activity existed alongside other metrics.
Again, we saw significant uplifts across a range of brands and categories compared to the average, but what was also interesting to us was that in some cases, the non-exposed Footprint sample were still more likely than average to record online activity for certain brands, with the exposed group recording still higher scores.
This underlined what we learned overall about our sample being more digitally active than the average person and also more curious, with a far higher proportion of their online activity spent searching and a far lower proportion of their time on social media.
Offline action
Maybe the most interesting stats from our research related to the offline actions that ad exposure drove. This is often the most unexplored area of measurement and the one that could have the most impact on the way in which we view advertising effectiveness.
We captured readers who had ‘acted’ either by purchasing a product or by indicating a positive brand choice and looked at the ads they had been exposed to. Again, for a number of brands we saw a strong correlation, e.g. 72% of readers who viewed a John Lewis went on to take an offline action, as did 21% of those who viewed a BMW ad.
We were also able to compare uplifts against those who had not been exposed to the advertising and again saw some positive results. For instance, in those examples, ad exposure resulted in a 7% uplift for John Lewis and a 163% uplift for BMW.
Multiple effects
Of course consumers aren’t binary and advertisers are keen to encourage multiple actions following advertising exposure. Looking more deeply at our data we were also able to identify people who took multiple actions after seeing an ad.
For example, 40% of those exposed to advertising for a retail brand went on to have both a conversation and undertake online activity during the four week duration of our study.
But what does this all mean?
Clearly, there are a lot of ways one can read this data. As someone who works in the newspaper industry, I obviously want to say that it shows that newspaper advertising is able to capitalise on the strong engagement readers have with the medium and can deliver real impact. I think that case is strongly made.
However, looking at it with a broader research and advertising industry hat on I think it tells us much more than this.
Firstly, the Project Footprint research tells us that we’re all underselling ourselves when it comes to the impact of advertising. By focusing on the easy wins of online tracking we’re limiting the extent to which we can capture the broader, more holistic value of advertising.
Secondly, it shows that consumers are complex and react to advertising exposure in a range of different ways. The sledgehammer of last click attribution is exposed for the blunt instrument it is.
Whilst last click is important to look at, the wider ranging factors that drove searches, site visits and conversations prior to that click are also essential, albeit harder to measure parts of the increasingly complex sales funnel.
Sean Adams is head of commercial insight at News UK.