Specifics For Evaluating Advertising

If you don’t have a plan that includes specifics for evaluating advertising, you might as well put your money in a Ponzi scheme.

Check store traffic

An important function of advertising is to build store traffic which results in purchases of items that are not advertised. Pilot studies show, for example, that many customers who are brought to the store by an ad for a blouse also bought a handbag. Some bought the bag in addition to the blouse, others instead of the blouse.

You may be able to use a local college or high school distributive education class to check store traffic. Class members could interview customers as they leave the store to determine: 1. which advertised items they bought, 2. what other items they bought, and 3. what they shopped for but did not buy.

Testing Attitude Advertising

When advertising is spread out over a selling season or several seasons, part of the measurement job is keeping records. Your aim is comparing records of ads and sales for extended time.

An easy way to set up a file is by marking the date of the run on tear sheets of newspaper ads (many radio stations now provide “radio tear sheets”, too), log reports of radio and television ads, and copies of direct mail ads. The file may be broken down into monthly quarterly, or semiannual blocks. By recording the sales of the advertised items on each ad or log, you can make comparisons.

In attitude (or image-building) advertising, the individual ads are building blocks, so to speak, which make up your advertising over a selling season. The problem is trying to measure each ad and the effects of all of the ads taken together.

One approach is making your comparisons on a weekly basis. If you run an ad, for example, each week, at the end of the first week after the ad appears or is broadcast, compare that week’s sales with sales for the same week a year ago. At the end of the second week, compare your sales with those of the end of the first week as week as year-ago figures.

For web marketing using a tool like Google Analytics is, in my opinion, the best way. If you also run “internet specials”, your sales volume at a specific price can be evaluated. These evaluations need to be done on a weekly basis.