Performance accountability for upper-funnel campaigns

Great attributes of digital marketing campaigns are the inherent track-ability of the Web and the performance transparency possible by tying explicit business measures such as leads or transactions resulting from a digital media investment.

But, sometimes campaigns are not focused on direct response, but rather influencing upper-funnel stages such as awareness and consideration.  When this is the case, a best practice is to conduct pre- vs. post-campaign brand survey studies, but we can also utilize an audience engagement construct based on online behaviors that act as proxies for awareness and/ or consideration and be leading indicators of future economic value (leads, transactions).

There are a number of behaviors that can make up an engagement score – rich-media ad interactions (window expansions, video plays, utilizations such as calculators or games), homepage visitation (especially via post-impression response^†), landing page visitation, store/ branch locater activity, consumption of high-value content (reinforcing campaign messages), etc.

However, not all of these behavioral interactions are equally valuable depending upon campaign goals and the interaction’s respective place in the purchase funnel – visiting store locater results pages is an intuitively stronger indicator of purchase intent likelihood than visiting the campaign landing page or even the brand homepage or ad unit interactions.

To account for this differential value of interactions, each behavior can be weighted, respectively, to reflect each one’s relative value (say, on a scale from 0-2, or whatever is appropriate for the specific brand’s business).

Once a methodology is established, the engagement score can be utilized as the basis for gauging campaign responsiveness (via engagement yield = engagement score/ ad impressions) as well as financial efficiency (via cost per engagement = media cost/ engagement score) to guide campaign optimization decisions.

So, the next time, your client has a digital campaign focused on influencing upper-funnel activities, and you don’t have the time, funds, or interest in formally evaluating brand awareness and consideration measures from a brand survey study, consider behavioral engagement as a good, easily available success proxy.

What experiences have you had in using online behavior measures as gauges of success for upper-funnel digital campaigns…? What else would you consider…?

^†Post-impression (PI) response represents the target audience being exposed to online display advertising (OLA), not clicking on the ad (banner), but at a later time visiting the brand’s site and exhibiting the campaign’s goal behaviors (homepage visit, priority content consumption, order submission, etc.). PI response typically accounts for 60-90% of total campaign response.