The CMO’s Guide to Brand Metrics

With marketers’ continued investment in digital and social media, CMOs need to pay close attention to brand metrics. This is particularly important when traditional marketing tactics are employed to ensure that your integrated (traditional, digital and social) marketing campaigns  break through the clutter.

With this blog, we share the most effective brand metrics to optimize your marketing investment.

1. Balance Quality with Quantity

More is not necessarily better when measuring on and offline branding efforts, for example the number of impressions can be irrelevant in isolation of other related measures.

A range of brand metrics should be employed to ensure on-strategy and relevant messaging is being communicated to your target audiences. Read on for more specifics.

2. Make it Relevant

In marketers’ quest for maximum impressions at the lowest cost, programmatic media buying has increased the likelihood of irrelevant digital ad placement and consequent reduced brand linkage.

Suggested measures to evaluate the relevance of ad impressions include:

• Interaction rate: The percentage of impressions in a campaign where a user entered the ad frame and remained active (not parked) for an agreed period (the IAB suggests5 seconds). This is a basic measure of physical attention.
• Interaction time: Average length of time the user interacted with the ad.
• Click-through-to-open-rates as a per cent of click-through rates.
• Conversion of the user to the offer.

3. Ensure Brand Linkage

Online and offline advertising has no value unless viewers identify the ad with the brand.

There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that in-view time has a strong correlation with brand effectiveness, so the longer an ad is in the viewport, the stronger the brand lift will be.

•  In-view time: The length of time an ad has been active and in view. For some ads on high-quality editorial sites, this could be minutes, while on other quick-hit pages (e.g., checking the weather), average in-view time could be closer to the one-second viewability threshold.
• Universal interaction time: Average length of time the user interacted with the ad.

Visibility, brand linkage and interaction rate and time can be viewed together to get a picture of an ad’s capacity to stand out from the digital clutter, but only if the ad elicited the desired response — a change in intention, behavior or attitudes toward the brand.

4. Awareness Still Rules

A classic measure of the expected success of a brand is to survey awareness with your target audiences. Awareness is one of the few proven measures of integrated marketing campaign effectiveness; it serves as a crossover between traditional and digital marketing measurement.

5. Don’t Forget About Brand Image

• Do people feel more positive toward the brand after they experience the advertising? Brands will often look at two components: affinity (brand closeness) and relevance (how well the brand meets a consumer’s personal needs). This is most often tested through survey method.
• Does the viewer feel strongly enough about the message and brand to share their feelings? There is ample evidence that recommendations from family and friends are the most credible form of advertising. Social referral measures play a key role. Strength of referral is also measured through survey method.
• After viewing the ad (digital, TV print or other) does this increase their purchase intent? Again, most often measured through survey method.

6. Bottom Line

The bottom line is to ask yourself is your marketing campaign doing it’s job? This is about behaviour change driving purchase, engagement, increased sales and profit. Are consumers more likely to buy the brand more often or use the brand more frequently after being exposed to the digital or traditional advertising? This is often characterized as a likelihood to purchase, consider, test drive or sign up. The frequency of purchase and usage will give you a better understanding of the persuasion of your integrated marketing campaign.