Does advertising have an “effect”?

The advertising industry usually uses superficial data indicators such as "exposure/click/conversion" to measure effectiveness. However, it has been difficult to use data to clearly explain whether advertising has an impact on the brand level and which users are actually affected by brand advertising. What other indicators are needed to determine whether an advertisement is “effective”?

The advertising industry usually uses superficial data indicators such as "exposure/click/conversion" to measure effectiveness. However, it has been difficult to use data to clearly explain whether advertising has an impact on the brand level and which users are actually affected by brand advertising.

Recently, Philip Kotler mentioned at the "2019 Kotler Future Marketing Summit" that world-class marketers should "use big data and market analysis to gain insight into customers' potential needs, with the goal of increasing interaction and loyalty with customers." Whether it is top marketing masters or front-line marketing practitioners, they are all concerned about the relationship between advertisers and users, and the entire industry is in urgent need of a scientific and effective measurement method to judge the effectiveness of advertising.

Tencent Advertising's "Uplift Advertising Effectiveness Measurement", which has been widely discussed in the industry recently, constructs a scientific and systematic cause-and-effect relationship, making the previously "taken-for-granted" guesses become intuitive and credible.

So, what exactly is Uplift advertising effectiveness measurement?

Tencent Advertising has launched the first technology product in China that can scientifically measure advertising effectiveness - Uplift advertising effectiveness measurement, which includes "Brand Lift" and "Sales Lift", which measure the advertising effectiveness that advertisers care about from the two aspects of brand and effect respectively.

The discovery and application of this technology has indeed brought great shock to the advertising industry and solved the problems that have been bothering us for a long time, especially the Brand Lift part, which is precisely the part that the advertising industry has always found difficult to measure scientifically.

Brand Lift consists of two parts:

(1) Brand interaction measurement

It is used to measure the incremental effect of interactive behavior between users and brands within the WeChat ecosystem after advertising is placed: reading, collecting, and forwarding of brand-related public account articles.

We often pay attention to the dimension of "brand interaction" when doing marketing, but due to the limited amount of data, statistical tools, and analytical capabilities, it is not objective and true. Of course, there are still marketers who ignore the value of this data analysis. If you place an advertisement in the circle of friends, interested users will have multi-dimensional behaviors, such as directly clicking to buy, searching for relevant information in WeChat, following related articles, reading, collecting, and forwarding them. With such behavioral intentions, advertisers can publish relevant content in advance for the next placement and conduct integrated marketing.

• Suitable for advertisements that require in-depth understanding of product-related information, such as beauty products. Behind the advertisement, it is necessary to understand the product functions, effects, user experience reports, etc. The combination of "advertising + seeding articles" also requires Brand Lift's insights;
• It is suitable for new brands or new sub-brands. The market awareness of new products is not high. Reading, collecting and other behaviors are very valuable for distinguishing interested users, which makes it easier to understand the improvement of users' favorability towards the brand, rather than being attracted solely by the promotional information of the advertisement.

(2) Brand Opinion Measurement

It is used to measure the positive and negative emotional changes of users towards a brand after the advertisement is released, and is broken down into the positive brand opinions that have increased the most and the negative brand opinions that have decreased the most among all types of opinions.

Brands learn about users’ evaluation opinions in order to improve and optimize products and enhance brand favorability.

• Optimize products: Allow companies to more clearly see the strengths and weaknesses of their products or brands, and then improve and optimize products and advertising materials;
• Optimize advertising: Another value of positive and negative opinions is that advertisers can clearly understand the gap between products and advertisements, and between users’ opinions. They can also know whether misleading information appears in the creative delivery, and can immediately optimize and improve their advertising creativity.

"Sales Lift" is designed for "conversion lift measurement", which mainly measures the actual conversion behavior lift rate and lift amount after advertising, including App activation, adding to shopping cart, placing orders, lead retention, actual store visits, etc.

In the past, people paid particular attention to the effect layer. Sales Lift, launched in April this year, is the best product that can measure the effect of the entire chain from advertising to final conversion, and can cross the barriers between online and offline. Now, the Uplift product system has been superimposed with "Brand Lift" which measures brand efficiency. The combination of the two conducts a comprehensive measurement from product to efficiency. This is the true "integration of brand and efficiency"!

Application scenarios of Uplift advertising effectiveness measurement:

Scenario 1: Verifying the synergy value of brand campaigns

After launching a brand advertisement, we often don’t know whether this advertisement has any impact on brand interaction or brand opinion? How much impact? Is there any improvement?

Brand Lift can determine whether brand advertising actually has an impact on the user's mind, and understand the proportion of users' positive opinions about the brand, their active search intentions, and the collection and forwarding rates of related articles. Through the measurement results of Brand Lift, Tencent Advertising understands users’ brand interaction behaviors in terms of searching, reading and forwarding, and guides brands to increase their investment in operational traffic within WeChat , thereby strengthening users’ in-depth brand awareness and category penetration.

Scenario 2: Advertising Strategy Optimization

In every advertising budget, we certainly want to know clearly: which groups of people will convert because of the advertising! Today, advertisers can use Sales Lift to understand the incremental effects of different groups, different placements, different creatives, and different delivery frequencies, find the people who are truly easily influenced by advertising, find the population portrait with the highest rate of increase in sales efficiency, and strengthen the delivery and promotion strategies for this group to drive final conversions.

For example, Sales Lift helped Tyrannosaurus measure the incremental improvement of advertising on the conversion chain within the mini program, including the three conversion behaviors of advertising-driven users visiting the Tyrannosaurus mini program mall, adding to shopping carts, and placing orders.

Through the two scenarios of "verifying the efficiency value of brand launch activities" and "optimizing advertising strategies", we provide advertisers with more effective tools for advertising from the brand and effect levels. I would like to briefly summarize the value points of Uplift to advertisers in three keywords: efficiency, cost, and conversion.

1. Efficiency: It is more efficient to truly find the people you want to influence;
2. Cost: Avoid budget waste and solve the problem of “50% budget” waste;
3. Conversion: Provide more targeted guidance for subsequent delivery strategies, improve conversion, and achieve effective coordination between brand advertising and performance advertising.

What impact does Uplift advertising effectiveness measurement have on the advertising and marketing industry?

(1) Data-driven thinking: Data-driven marketing strategies

The vague, unclear and non-specific pattern of brand indicators has been broken. By constructing them through cause-and-effect relationships, the data presentation is clearer, more specific and more intuitive, which is convenient for further guiding the delivery strategy.

(2) Refined management: Refined analysis

In the era of digital marketing, it is particularly important to manage and analyze user behavior after advertising through systematic marketing tools and platforms. The optimization and improvement of a detail can lead to marketing growth for the company, such as the "collection behavior" of Dyson users. Dyson placed ads in WeChat Moments and converted them to JD.com. Through Uplift's efficiency measurement, it was found that this advertising campaign had an improvement effect on the five major conversion behaviors (browsing, searching, collecting, adding to cart, and placing orders), resulting in an increase of more than 20% in collection behavior, and the impact continued within one month after the launch.

The occurrence of "collection behavior" is closely related to user purchase intention, user consumption power, promotional activities (Double Eleven, 618, etc.), promotional tools (limited time, full discount), etc. Moreover, through the analysis of Uplift effectiveness measurement, Tencent Advertising also found that the collection behavior has the most obvious effect on women aged 21-30, living in first- and second-tier cities, and with a bachelor's degree. This can be used to guide targeted marketing activities, formulate more effective promotion strategies for the above-mentioned potential customer groups, and promote the conversion of brand potential customer groups into brand user groups.

(3) Full-chain marketing: from delivery to conversion, from online to offline

There are also big differences in the decision-making chains of different products. For example, some are "planted" online to lead to offline consumption, while others are completed entirely online, or are non-instantaneous decisions that require specific scenarios to trigger user consumption. Therefore, "full-chain marketing" is not just a way of thinking or a strategic method, but a real marketing capability. For example, Dyson places advertisements on WeChat Moments to divert traffic to JD.com's landing page, Magiray places advertisements on WeChat Moments and then verifies coupons in offline stores, or Tyrannosaurus Rex uses advertisements to divert users to visit the mini-program mall, etc. From platforms, content, to marketing data management tools, scientific efficiency measurement is needed to help advertisers break through the online and offline marketing gap .

Dyson, Magiray, and Tyrannosaurus full-chain marketing case examples

For full-chain marketing, Tencent Advertising, based on Tencent big data and using advanced algorithm engines, has industry-leading capabilities in intelligent targeting, intelligent bidding, intelligent creativity, intelligent budgeting, intelligent experiments, intelligent diagnosis, and intelligent measurement. It runs through the entire chain of the advertising delivery process, helping advertisers to accurately expand their customer base and achieve efficient conversions.

The emergence of Uplift allows us to better understand consumers' decision-making motivations, psychological changes, and behavioral characteristics. We have always hoped to turn customers into lifelong customers. This is the most exciting thing for a business, but we often have "wishful thinking". How to "know ourselves and our opponents" and "know what is going on" requires data insights and analysis from different dimensions.

Next suggestions for marketers and advertisers:

1. Use the Uplift app to measure and compare smart advertising with traditional advertising, and then optimize advertising strategies and budgets;
2. Through advertising, we continuously accumulate brand data assets, effectively measure brand interactions and opinion dynamics, reduce negative opinions, and enhance brand favorability.

Good tools and capabilities can help advertisers achieve twice the result with half the effort, and Uplift is doing just that. We look forward to more and better cases to prove that the value of “advertising effectiveness measurement” has been widely recognized and applied.

Author: Wei Jiadong

Source: Wei Jiadong