GfK unveils its Media Efficiency Panel
GfK has teamed up with Kantar and nurago to launch its Media Efficiency Panel (MEP) in the UK.
The panel, which has been running in Germany since 2008, was set up in the UK late last year. It consists of 10,000 households and 17,000 panellists, aiming to bring together online, offline and purchasing data in a single source to measure the ROI of media campaigns.
Speaking at a breakfast event in London this morning, GfK said the MEP is a unique, cross media single source panel that measures campaign effectiveness on actual sales.
MEP was designed to answer questions, such as how does online advertising impact offline sales; what is the incremental contribution of online media to campaign reach; and how does online and offline work together?
It works with nurago’s tracking software, which panellists download to their home PC, that can monitor URLs, search queries, search results, searched-for ads, as well as content, keywords and ad exposure.
This data is analysed alongside (panel-based) TV measurement data to calculate ROI. GfK also uses Barb data to calibrate the television viewing, and the Kantar home-scanner to monitor purchases.
Kantar manages the MEP’s offline panel, which surveys television, print, outdoor and radio consumption once a year. GfK confirmed today that going forward, the offline panel will be surveyed quarterly.
However, while the MEP’s online data is available continuously via nurago’s software, the TV and offline data is updated less frequently and only provides an assumption of what ads people might have seen rather than what they have actually seen (as with online).
In addition, it is not possible to ask whether panellists are searching for something online because of what they’ve seen on television, although this is something they’d like to add, according to GfK’s research director Gary Roddy.
Speaking about the panel when it first launched, Roddy said: “We are excited to bring the Media Efficiency Panel to the market. For the first time, the UK marketing industry will have real empirical data linking internet advertising directly to sales and the ability to compare this with other above-the-line advertising. We believe this will help marketing budget decisions to be made in a much more informed way.
“The Media Efficiency Panel is a powerful complement to existing industry tools like UKOM, providing clients with great data to enable accurate campaign ROI evaluation.”