Awareness Incrementality For Different Channels
Marginal Conversion is Simple Enough…
I’ve only ever worked at large F100 companies before that are household consumer names, so my view of testing marketing tactics rely heavily on how many incremental conversions are generated. For household names, awareness is never really that large of an issue, so I could operate more on the level of moving people down from consideration into conversion without worrying about baseline knowledge of the product and brand. And in all honesty, testing incrementality in conversion is rather easy. The KPI here is a very tangible figure: net-new revenue.
Incremental conversion is such a common measure that even out-of-the-box solutions like Google Analytics offers it in the form of multi-touch attribution. (which I wrote about here). However, solutions like these hinge upon the ability to clearly define the end goal. Conversion here can be defined as a check-out or sign up, but the key here is that it’s straightforward to apply a consistent methodology across each user or session to define it as a conversion or not. And with that indicator, it’s relatively simple to run an A/B test to compare conversions against control to see incremental lift.
…But What About Marginal Awareness?
However, creating a constant definition for awareness isn’t as easy. After all, conversion is a signal sent by the customer, but there’s nothing for customers to signal awareness that we’re capturing. And for brands that are newer to the market, generating awareness is critical before they can work to move prospects down the funnel to an eventual conversion. So I’ll admit my surprise when Kelly Vaughn mentioned that while she pushes content across multiple channels to hit multiple audiences, she hasn’t actually measured the incrementality of each tactic.
Part of the reason is that it’s expensive to measure awareness is that the data isn’t free. Awareness test can happen on the basis of search volume or actual web traffic, but in most cases that’s a combination of both awareness and consideration intent. True plain awareness testing is often done with aided or unaided awareness tests, or where a group of paid respondents are asked to list brands that come to mind, or select which brands on the list they recognize.
In this case, measuring the incrementality of targeted mediums for awareness (display ads for example) can be done via segmentation with DMPs like Neustar or Acxiom and running an A/B test where the output is aided vs unaided awareness scores. The difference between the two (assuming a small margin of error) would give us the incrementality on display ads. Partnering with vendors like Nielsen could allow us to segment households into test vs control for broadcasted advertisements through TV and radio. Even though testing awareness is more complex and expensive than testing conversion, it’s a much needed operational step for relatively new businesses that must generate a demand for their products.
