How to Evaluate Advertising Programs

Before evaluating and analyzing your advertising program, you must first develop it. There are more in depth guides on how to develop an advertising program out  there, but I am going to give you a few of the basics. If you feel confident that your program is sufficient, you can skip down to the next column.

Four tips to developing an advertising program

1. Define your goals with the campaign. - Your goals may be increased exposure, more sales, email addresses, or an assortment of things. Figure out what your goals are before you decide how to get them accomplished.
   
2. Your goals will determine how you will evaluate advertisements. If you want to increase buyer awareness then a way to measure this is by conducting a survey. FInd out how may people like your brand before an after showing them an advertisement. I go more into this later.
3. Pick out measurement tools. These come in various forms and depend on the industry you are in. Say you are running an email advertisement, and your goals are to get product sales. You measure this by how many people bought the product, how many people received the email, and how many people showed interest.
4. Implement your advertising strategy and begin measuring the results. Keep reading to find out certain procedures used to evaluate how well your advertising programs are doing.
   

1. Recall tests - Get an estimation of how high the percentage is of people who claim to have read a magazine and can recall the advertisement and its intended message.
2. Recognition tests - Get a separate estimation of the percentage of magazine readers who have looked through the magazine and later recognize the ad when it is shown to them.
3. Opinion tests - These are tests given to a group of potential audience members. The group is shown several different versions of the advertisement, and asked to rate the ones that they liked the most, believed the most, and were most interested in.
4. Theater tests - Get movie goers opinions and preferences for a certain brand before and after the advertisement has been played.

1. If your primary objective is awareness then you can evaluate it by asking potential buyers which brands come to mind when they think of a certain product category. A message is shown through the advertisement being used and the buyers are asked to identify the brand that was mentioned.
2. If you want to focus on consumer attitude you can ask the potential buyers to rate your brand with competing brands on benefits and buying factors. Let them rate this by using a rating scale.
   

1. One thing that you will want to know is the intention to buy. Use a scale from "will not buy" to "will definitely buy" to see whether the potential buyers are serious about purchasing the product.
2. Monitor changes in sales numbers in different markets. Do this by implementing a market test. Use the market test to compare the effects of budget levels and the various messages that you are using in the advertising.