Measure your awareness campaign.

It was the summer of 2017, I was working for a travel company where we were looking to increase leads for holiday destinations like Ladakh, Shimla, and a few international destinations like Singapore, Europe etc.

People knew about these destinations but did not know about the brand I was working for- ezeego1.

Our target was to increase leads for these destinations.

While the straightforward way was to bid on relevant keywords on Google. But the space was cluttered. There were players with deep pockets like Make my trip, goibibo, cleartrip, kesari etc.

CPC for the ‘Ladakh trip’ keyword was as high as ₹80-100 in summer.

While during the off-season, CPC for the same keyword was ₹15-20.

While running Google search ads was a logical choice but was not viable from the cost perspective.

And because our brand was not that well known, even if we ran Google search ads, people would click on competition ads more than our ads.

Hence our CTRs will be low resulting in a decrease in quality scores and a further rise in CPCs.

In the travel industry, typically a destination remains a hot-selling destination for about 3 months a year.

Hence, the approach we finalised was to run a brand awareness campaign along with conversion campaigns.

We parked 30% of our monies toward creating awareness.

Our brand was hardly known at that time.

The channels used were YouTube and Instagram- since this is where travel conversation/research mainly happens.

The results over the next 3 months were staggering:

But is it possible to directly attribute this improvement in numbers to the awareness campaign?

No. Unless you use advanced analytics, it is difficult to directly attribute these numbers to awareness campaigns.

But there are ways in which you judge the performance of an awareness campaign and connect the dots with that of a conversion campaign.

Trust me when I say this, very few marketers can answer the question-

How successful was the awareness campaign?

Linking the success to a conversion campaign directly is always questionable.

And in today’s newsletter, I will attempt to give you that answer.

There are many metrics that you can look at to justify whether an awareness campaign did its job or not.

1. Delta in your brand followership:

Before you start your awareness campaign, keep a record of 30-60-90 days of followership growth on your social handles.

These could be Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook, whichever is your primary social channel.

And compare the daily growth before the awareness campaign went LIVE to the day it went LIVE.

People who follow your brand on social channels are typically part of the ‘Consideration‘ phase of the marketing funnel.

This means they are fully aware of the product/service you provide and now they follow you to check you out more before they make up their minds to buy.

The more you grow this audience, the higher the chances that these people will buy from you in due course of time.

You have moved these audiences to the second stage of the marketing funnel- Consideration which is one step closer to buying.

2. Delta in website metrics

Typically, when a brand does an awareness campaign, some of its website metrics take a shift too.

Compare the below metrics of your website before and during an awareness campaign:

Direct traffic- People who are coming to your website URL directly or someone sharing the URL of your website with them.

Branded Organic traffic- People will start looking for your brand name on Google, increasing your branded share of traffic.

Non-branded organic traffic- If your non-branded organic results appear between 4-10 positions for a chunk of keywords, people will start clicking on your results compared to your competition’s. Hence increasing your non-branded organic traffic too.

Bounce rate- You may think this will go down. But in most cases bounce rate of websites increases because of an influx of traffic coming to the website. This also means there will be more irrelevant audience landing on your website, increasing your bounce rate.

But you should not stress if the bounce rate increases slightly. It is common for this metric to go up in awareness campaigns.

Always keep an eye on your website server, if it is a shared server, your website is always at risk of returning errors to users.

It is always recommended if you are about to do a heavy-duty awareness campaign, move your website to a dedicated server to avoid web crashes.

3. Delta in Google ads metrics:

Typically when a brand runs an awareness campaign, there are two direct changes visible-

a) a reduction in CPC

b) an increase in quality score.

The reason why both of these happens is simply that people click on your ad more often. Hence resulting in better quality scores and lower CPCs.

Brands also see an increase of 1.5-2x in conversion rates if there are awareness campaigns running in parallel to a conversion campaign.

4. App metrics:

These days there are 2 impulsive actions people take after discovering your brand are- checking out your social handles and installing your app.

While the absolute number of app downloads goes up during an awareness campaign, there are 2 more metrics that marketers need to keep an eye on-

a) Crash analytics- Higher traffic on the app should not lead to more app crashes, which usually happens with a lot of apps.

b) App uninstall rate- 56% of people uninstall an app within 7 days of installing it. While a brand cannot directly control this, keeping an eye on the benchmark and not crossing it is always better. If too many people are uninstalling the app in the first 7 days, it is a reflection of an incorrect user onboarding experience or too many app crashes or gaps in awareness campaign communication vs delivery on the app.

5. Pixel audience:

This is where most marketers falter. Next time when you run an awareness campaign, create these audience cuts on Facebook:

a) people who visit your website

b) people who interact with social channels

c) people who watch 50% of reels/videos that you run in the awareness campaign

And run a retargeting campaign in parallel combining all of these audiences.

Do not put too much money on these audiences but having an always-on campaign for T+30 days after your awareness campaign starts will give the best results.

6. Logins/registrations:

During an awareness campaign, people will log in to your website and drop off.

But the fact that they are logging in is a strong validation that your awareness campaign is not only getting people to the website but the audience is also navigating deep and signing up.

This is your precious first-party data. Keep a tab on the increase in daily registrations and have a seamless automation and onboarding experience for these audiences.

7. Internet mentions:

This refers to mentions of your brand, product, or services in the news, on social media, and in industry publications.

If you want to take it one step further, you can track the sentiment of these mentions to see if what people are saying is positive, negative, or neutral. Setting up a Google Alert is an excellent way to get you started.

The point of brand awareness is to get people talking about your brand and tracking what and how often people are talking about you certainly gets right to the heart of that.

This is an integral part of tracking any brand awareness efforts and can give everyone in your organization vital information about future products, support and, of course, marketing campaigns.

8. Ad recall shift study by Facebook and Google :

Both Facebook and Google run Brand recall shift surveys while you run an awareness campaign.

This is the way by which you can track if people remember seeing your awareness ads.

The results of this study are available on your Facebook and Google dashboards.

For users, these surveys appear like this:

You can also measure the cost per Ad recall lift to see how much is every recall costing you.

9. Brand recall study by Kantar:

Especially in the case of Facebook and Google, they both provide a more, in-depth brand recall study of your campaign by doing primary research themselves.

They float various surveys to your target audiences and ask people to fill out those surveys. And people are paid a certain amount of money for each survey.

This helps brands in getting a first-hand view of what the audience perceives about the brand and the impact of the brand awareness campaign.

Kantar, quantifies the results of these surveys and shares it back with brands so that they can learn and improvise future marketing campaigns.

You can either get in touch with your Facebook/Google PoC or Kantar directly to conduct such surveys.

That’s it for today, folks.

I am excited to announce that I have recently launched my YouTube channel to create long-form content.

On this channel, I will break down various marketing and productivity topics for you to become a better marketing professional. YouTube videos will also have many secrets to running successful digital marketing campaigns.

Here is your chance to subscribe to the channel right now. The first video is dropping soon and you would not want to miss it.

We also started a new cohort of A to Z of digital marketing masterclass yesterday (8th April) which had students from various industries like travel, retail, fashion, and jewellery. These students will spend 4 Saturdays with us learning Digital marketing from a business lens.

If you are interested in joining the next cohort, here is your chance to avail ‘Early Bird offer‘. Sign up for A to Z of digital marketing masterclass and use code- Apurv10 on the cart page to get an additional 10% discount. Coupon Valid till 10th April midnight only.

Have an awesome week ahead.

Cheers,

Apurv