How To Measure The Success Of Your Creative Campaigns

When you’re spending a lot of money on your advertisement, you want to ensure that you’re not wasting your budget on underperforming campaigns right? By investing in creative testing, you’ll be able to measure just how successful your creative campaigns will be amongst your target audience, meaning you will save money, ensure you exceed your KPIs and grow your revenue. 

What is creative testing?

Creative testing is a way of analysing your creative campaigns to know which advert is going to provide you with the best results and help with ROI. Whether you’re testing static artwork such as; posters, social media posts or video content - creative testing allows you to see how well your campaigns perform amongst your target audience. It’s an opportunity to either test multiple designs (similar to A/B testing) to see which one comes out on top or even run competitor analysis. 

So essentially, creative testing allows you to measure which campaign is the most effective and helps to steer your marketing efforts in the right direction.

Why is it important?

There are a number of reasons why testing your creative is important, from optimising your adverts, boosting your engagement and revenue to reducing the amount of costs wasted on underperforming campaigns. 

It is said that at least 50% of all advertising is missed by the population, but what does that mean for ad memorability and costs? Let’s take a deeper look:

So if £500k buys 1,000,000 impressions or 50,000 people = £10 per person in market

But if 50% won’t reach the right person, that means £500k buys 500,000 impressions or 25,000 people = £20 per person in market

But if ad memorability is only 38%, 62% actually think the ad was for another brand, that means that £500k really buys 190,000 impressions or 9,500 people which equals £52 to target each person with your message. However, this also means you are spending £32 per person to tell your target audience about another brand. 

What if you were able to increase memorability from 38% to 60%? Using an automated platform; such as Rare: Metrics will automatically highlight which adverts will work best based on customer feedback so you don’t have to waste time or money on campaigns that just won’t work or even fund your competitors' ads! 

How to get started with creative testing?

Before you jump right in and start testing any old creative, there are a few things you may want to consider ahead of time to make sure you are getting the most out of your testing.

Clarify your objectives

To begin with you need to be thinking about what are your main objectives for using a research tool and testing your creatives? There are multiple different reasons as to why you would want to be using a creative from:

• understanding which creative is the most memorable and actually aligns with your brand 

• gaining insight into what resonates best with your target audience

• understanding how your creative campaigns compare to your competitors 

• knowing which creative stands out and will cut through the noise 

Or perhaps it’s all of the above but having a clear idea of what it is you’re looking to achieve and wanting your results to tell you, will help with your marketing and brand strategy and ensure that you not only receive the data but create actionable insights from it.

Choosing your creative

Creative testing can (and should) be used throughout any stage of the creative development process, from the initial drawings through to your final creative decisions.

Depending on your main objectives, this will determine which creatives you would like to test and at which stage. By testing your creative adverts, this can help you to make any amends to the copy or images to ensure that you are hitting the right note for your audience from the very beginning.

Setting up your study

Now that you have decided on your objectives and the number of creatives to test, it’s time to set up your study and start collecting your data.

When you are setting up your study, remember to think about these main points:

• Choosing your audience - who are you going to be targeting that will wield you the best results? Are you looking for a national demographic or do you have a more specific audience you’d like to reach? E.g. females aged between 25 - 45. You need to choose what is best for your brand to get the most out of your data

• Deadlines - do you have specific deadlines for your testing? Make sure you know your timelines so that you know how long you’d like to run your test for 

  • Keep in mind, the more niche your audience demographic is, the longer it may take to get your results in 

• Finally, think about and know what your budget is for when you run your tests

Utilising your results

Once your data has been collected, it’s time to start analysing your results and turning these into actions that can help improve your creative campaigns. With Rare: Metrics, we measure across 4 key areas, Memorability, Love/Hate, Actionable and On-Brand, so you can identify which advert is working best for you and your objectives.