Before you commit thousands or millions of dollars to an ad campaign, you would like to have some reassurance that you will be getting a decent return on your investment. The best way to predict whether a campaign will be effective is to do some upfront advertising evaluation.

In the past, pre-testing ads was a cumbersome, time-consuming process, typically involving focus groups and in-person interviews. Today, online surveys offer a fast, cost-effective alternative to traditional testing methods.

Advertising Evaluation

What should an online survey measure? Most advertisers would agree on these eight parameters:

1. Recognition. When advertisers test recognition, they are just trying to determine whether respondents remember seeing an ad before. For example, a survey might show respondents several ads and ask which ones they remember.

2. Recall. Advertisers use the term recall to describe what a viewer gets out of an ad. For example, a survey might show respondents an ad with the brand name removed and ask what brand the ad is promoting.

3. Attitude and opinion. These questions are meant to determine how respondents feel about a product based on an ad.

4. Comprehension. Questions about comprehension test how well respondents understand an ad. These questions are particularly worthwhile for ad campaigns that rely on allusions or subtle messages.

5. Credibility. These questions are meant to determine what portion of respondents believe the claims made in ad.

6. Persuasiveness. Questions in this category are meant to determine to what extent respondents are persuaded to adopt a viewpoint promoted in an ad.

7. Buying predisposition. These questions may take a variety of forms. For example: “How likely are you to buy this product in next month?” “How do you think this product compares to specifically named competitors?” These questions are meant to determine how much an ad encourages participants to take the next step and make a purchase.

8. Ad rating. This is a subjective overall measure of what respondents think about an ad. Do they find it amusing, annoying, aesthetically pleasing?

Depending on the circumstances, advertisers may decide to weigh some of these parameters more heavily than others. For example, if an insurance company is trying to counteract stories about unfair treatment of policy holders, it may value credibility more than other parameters.

Making Sense of Survey Responses
Responses to questions in each of these categories can be useful in themselves, but they become more useful when viewed in relation to each other. For example, what topic correlates most strongly with buying predisposition? How is comprehension related to recall? A statistical tool called conjoint analysis can help advertisers understand these relationships by showing how specific variables interact.Conjoint analysis can also show how different features of an ad affect the eight parameters discussed above. For example, respondents might be shown different versions of an ad and asked questions intended to measure recall. The goal is to determine what combination of features in an ad has the strongest positive effect on a given parameter.

Mineful’s software makes advertising evaluation easy to perform, giving advertisers valuable guidance before they invest in major new campaigns.

As a leader in online survey software, Mineful helps you use marketing technology to make better decisions for your business. We have the software, the services, and the people to help you keep your current customers and attract new ones.

Mineful Software — Market Research Results in Real Time
Our online survey software lets you see how well your business processes are working and how they can be changed to do a better job of meeting your customers’ needs. Once you decide on a change, our software helps you monitor your initiative to see if it is achieving the intended results.

This process works smoothly with a minimum of effort and expense. It’s easy to customize your data gathering and analysis to gain the specific business intelligence you need to make more informed decisions. You don’t need to hire expensive market research consultants and wait for their reports. You can conduct your own analysis in real time and put your findings to work right away.

In simple terms, Mineful lets you do more with less. Since it is a web-based tool, you can skip the expense of installing, maintaining, and updating someone else’s software. Mineful’s well-designed interface is intuitive and easy to use. You can try it out for free before you subscribe.
Mineful makes the power of marketing technology available throughout your business. You can set different permissions for different users. It’s easy for users to collaborate and share the results of their analyses. Users can choose from a variety of powerful analytics, such as frequency distributions, cross tabs, and correlations. Reports are available in real time, so it’s easy to keep in touch with what customers are thinking.

Keeping in touch with people — maintaining relationships — is what surveys are all about. Improving customer relationships is the key to improving business performance.

Mineful Services — A Tech Savvy Team Working for You
Market research consultants can be prohibitively expensive, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. And too often they take a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t respond to your particular needs. Large companies can afford to hire tech-savvy employees to gather and analyze survey results, but for most businesses this is just not feasible.

Mineful offers a powerful and affordable alternative to hiring outside consultants or additional staff. For the cost of less than one employee, we can provide you with the technology and analytics you need to keep in touch with what your customers want and need. Our Strategic and Analytical Services team can help you define, develop, or redesign a successful program quickly and economically. We take a simple but effective approach to this task: set clear objectives up front, design a program to meet these objectives, and then test and learn.

Mineful People — Smart, Dedicated, and Experienced Professionals
Our staff have many years of experience in statistics, survey methods, and market research, enabling us to tackle even the most complex projects in marketing technology. We not only perform advanced analytics, but we communicate the results in an understandable, visually effective way. Our worldwide customer base includes Allstate, the American Society of Clinical Pathologists, KWT, MediaBank, and the Chicago public schools.

We have the resources — the software, the services, and the people — to help you keep in touch with your customers and gain a greater understanding of their wants needs.