Does your campaign website have the desired brand effect?

There is no doubt; campaign sites are becoming increasingly important in the media mix of advertisers. They have a central role in getting the message across and encouraging the consumer to interact with the brand. These particular sites relate to the specific objectives of the campaign and are in most cases less detailed than the permanent site. To measure the number of visitors and the time people spent on the site is easy enough, but how can you tell how effective it is in fulfilling its objectives within your overall campaign? What is the contribution of your campaign site when it comes to influencing the most important brand parameters?

MetrixLab’s Interactive Campaign Evaluation (ICE©) gives you the full picture, as it evaluates the brand effects of a campaign by examining different aspects of your campaign, like reach, frequency, user experience, site evaluation and attention value. It provides clear learnings for this central part of the campaign whilst being consistent with the way other forms of advertising are measured.

Outline

ICE© is based on proprietary technology and runs for the duration of the campaign, in order to assess awareness, message recall, message association, and whether the desired impact on the brand was achieved. Results are compared with a normative database and with a control cell, enabling you to position your branding website against competitors. The results include:

• The total Reach of the website including the number of times people have visited the site;
• Effects on brand metrics like brand and product awareness, message association, message take out, image of the brand, consideration and purchase intent to reflect the objectives of the campaign;
• Deeper insight and understanding of the user experience of a site;
• Creative performance in relation to a benchmark to see which part of the site works best and generates most positive reactions;
• Full analysis of attention; enabling advertisers and agencies to see what people see and what people miss on the website. Do they notice the brand and/or the main message.

ICE is unique in its approach and execution for the following reasons:

• Questionnaire: The questionnaire is designed to have the highest level of validity in combination with greater engagement for the respondent. This enables high quality of data and high completion rates. Some examples: 
  • Card Sort to compare with other brands. This technique is more valid and will lead to more discriminating data between brands.
  • Image picker to measure consideration and preference. This technique shows higher predictive value for real behaviour.
  • Focus Tracker (online eye-tracking) to measure attention directly. This creates additional insight into the communication performance of a site. 
• Comparison with other media: Our approach is in line with theories of brand communication, meaning that people are NOT interviewed directly after their visit to the Branding Site. We take into account the normal time delay before a campaign realizes a sustained effect, as with other media tracking and pre-post measures.
• Attention to measure CTS. This makes it possible to differentiate between what people see and where people click.

Methodology and set-up

ICE© uses a interactive questionnaires in a control/exposed methodology, in which a randomly selected population is split into two groups, differing only in the sense that they have had the opportunity to see a particular website. The questionnaires are always drawn up in close consultation with our clients and may contain additional questions e.g. related to the design, structure and content of your site. MetrixLab designed ICE to measure, analyse and ultimately improve the total brand and conversion impact of your campaign website over time as illustrated in the picture. ICE uses an innovative recruitment method, whereby people are asked to answer some general questions as they leave the site, but are not sent the questionnaire which assesses the brand impact until four days later. This time delay of four days is extremely important because with this the evaluation of a brand experience is comparable with other media. We compare the results of the visitors with a similar group of people belonging to the target audience who are recruited at the same moment they visit the campaign website but we use an interstitial to ask these people questions before they have seen something on the site. This means that we take into account the self selection effect of people visiting the website.

Your benefits

When it comes to measuring brand effects of dedicated websites, ICE© combines the best of two of MetrixLab’s specialities: website performance research and ad campaign evaluation. MetrixLab offers you:

• Complete assessment of your site through both quantitative and qualitative data;
• A method and analysis that is comparable with other forms of advertising evaluation tracking;
• Fun and interactive questionnaires leading to higher respondent engagement and better quality data;
• Clear results and actionable recommendations;
• Benchmarks to determine the competitive strength of your microsite;
• Everything you need to know to ensure successful future campaign websites.