Advertising is everywhere: you can see ads on billboards near the bus station; you see them on your phone while navigating on apps; you hear them on the radio and you see them on TV at night while watching your evening show. As advertisers, we make sure to deliver relevant ads on the relevant channels to the right audiences. One of the huge advantages of digital campaigns is that we are able to measure their impact and performance, as we can trigger tons of data from them. For more traditional advertising tools such as billboards or TV, it is much more difficult to measure the true performance of the campaigns and put numbers next to it.
The customer journey includes touchpoints both offline and online
Before visiting the website, completing a purchase online, filling out a form or performing any other conversion, the customer has several touchpoints with the brand, which we call ‘the customer journey’. Each touchpoint plays a role in the process of finally visiting the site and ultimately converting. For example, a woman might first see an ad on her favorite website, encounter it on her news feed, see it on TV and decide to visit the online website to get more information and eventually complete a conversion. TV, even though it is an OOH channel, is thus part of the whole customer journey that leads to a visit to the website and an eventual conversion.
For many clients, lots of different channels are used in order to advertise their brands. While these past years we have seen a strong shift towards digital advertising, it is without surprise that lots of budgets are still dedicated to TV advertising. While we can build strong dynamic dashboards to measure the performance of our online digital campaigns, we thus asked ourselves how we could also measure the impact TV has on the traffic to our website.
Does TV advertising help increase website traffic? In omnichannel strategies, we measure the impact of online to offline more and more often; but could we also measure the impact of offline to online?
How to perform a TV analysis?
First, you’ll need access to an analytics account. In our example below, we have used Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, we export data regarding the sessions on the website that are coming from direct, organic and brand traffic. We do not take into account other sources to avoid the advertising effect of other channels.
Then you will need a sheet with the details of the TV spots. The purpose is to easily see at which exact times the TV spots have run, on which channels they have been displayed and the cost of each TV spot.
At Semetis we have built a tool where we can input all these elements. By matching all this TV data with the sessions generated on the website, we are able to measure if traffic has increased in the next 10 minutes after each spot. Someone will be perceived as being impacted by a TV spot if he or she visits the website within 10 minutes after each spot that has been displayed (see the schema below).
What insights can we draw from such an analysis?
Our latest TV analysis has been performed for one of our French clients. We drew the following types of conclusions:
- TV spots have played an important role on website traffic and helped to increase visits per minute by 34%. The impact is different for the different periods of the day, the strongest being at night (+84%).
- During the TV spots (+ 10 min) most of the sessions have been generated thanks to TF1 and France 2.
- On average, the cost per session generated was of x€ on each channel. This cost differs according to the periods of the day.
- TV channel x is the second channel generating most sessions per minute and is the one that has the lowest cost per session: opportunity?
These insights help the client to make decisions for future TV spots, spot opportunities, and also have a broader perspective on advertising attribution.
What’s next?
To further expand our TV analysis, we want to analyse the behavior of new users vs returning users on the website. This will help draw more concrete insights on how many news users have been driven to the website thanks to the TV spots. We will also analyze if returning users are coming back directly thanks to the TV spots. In the case of an e-commerce client, we also want to analyze the impact TV has on transactions and define a ROI for our TV advertising. In the longer term, the purpose is to perfect this analysis timewise: right now we only look at the impact TV spots have on the website within the 10 minutes after they’ve been displayed. Beyond our current scope, we also want to perform the same type of analysis for radio. Omnichannel, automation, innovation? Semetis is taking on the challenge!
Anne Mathieu
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