At Code3, we operate at the intersection of media, creative, and commerce. Each is a critical component of strategy, especially as we navigate today’s ever-evolving digital landscape. In this blog post, we are focusing on creative and how your brand can best gauge the effectiveness of its creative assets. Throughout, we aim to explain why it matters and encourage you to revisit your strategy with a renewed focus.
The Role Creative Plays in Today’s Landscape
Before getting into the nitty-gritty details, it’s important to understand how creative impacts a brand’s bottom line and overall performance. According to Nielsen, creative can drive upwards of a 47% sales increase attributed to advertising. When brands have strong creative marketers working alongside their media teams, conversions are inevitably more likely. Creative is the visual element, paired with compelling copy, that ensures campaigns are engaging and effective.
Why it’s Important to Measure Creative Performance
As well-established brands already know, producing creative assets requires a significant investment of both time and money. Not to mention, the growing variety of platforms and customer preferences has become increasingly challenging to manage. In fact, at Code3 we activate across more than 10 of the most powerful platforms for our clients. For example, Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon, and more. And each platform has unique ad units within them that require specified creative. With this, ensuring your measurement strategy is dialed in is crucial. Otherwise, paying attention to meaningless metrics or taking an outdated approach could set you behind. And in today’s environment that’s not an option.
Tips for Successful Measurement
- Performance Across the Funnel
While one type of imagery may encourage someone to purchase or click, it could have the opposite effect on another person. Oftentimes this is determined by where a shopper is in their buying journey or what platform it’s served on.
With this, when measuring the effectiveness of creative, it's important to align goals and KPIs to each phase of the funnel. For example, when your goal is awareness, ads should be more focused on a brand message. And the success of that ad should be based on reach, views, and other similar metrics.
Measuring performance across audiences and platforms can help you understand what kinds of assets are driving the most value for your brand and are worth investing in going forward.
- Video Completion Rates
When creating video assets, it’s important to make the first three seconds count. This is the sweet spot of capturing the attention of the average viewer and making an impact. Given how short this timeframe is, measuring video completion rates isn’t necessarily going to tell you whether the video was effective or not.
We aim to bring the branding, product, and key message forward from the start of the video to make the biggest impact. Of course, depending on the goal of the video, and whether it's paid or organic, could change the metrics you should measure.
- Vanity Metrics
Measuring vanity metrics such as likes or shares is easy. That’s why so many people turn to those metrics. But when it comes down to understanding whether the creative was successful, likes and shares can only tell you so much. We suggest avoiding these metrics and focusing on metrics that align closely with the goal of your campaign as we mentioned above.
- Testing and Retesting
In the world of creative, new and innovative ideas are constantly flowing. As a result, adding new creative assets to campaign tests regularly is important. Otherwise, learnings could become obsolete. More specifically, at Code3, we prioritize testing various video lengths, the performance of static images versus video, and the impact of different messaging.
- Collaborate with Media Teams
Aligning with your media team, or other internal teams can make a major difference in whether your measurement efforts are valid and effective. We suggest reviewing the metrics you plan to focus on with the appropriate team to make sure you’re all on the same page from start to finish.
Final Thoughts
Brands and advertisers that have a solid measurement and optimization strategy in place for their creative will be ahead of the curve. This will allow you to take risks without risking it all. With plans in place to test, measure, and pivot, moving the needle forward will become a natural process.
If you could use the support of a strategic partner, please reach out. We’re here to help and welcome the opportunity to talk about how you can take your creative strategy up a notch.