As the advertising industry continues to evolve rapidly, marketers need ad measurement approaches that are truly ahead of the curve. Third-party cookies are deprecating, IP addresses are losing their validity, and CTV/OTT has become a dominant form of entertainment. These trends shrink the value of legacy ad measurement platforms and pressure marketers to retool their approaches.
Deciding when and how to use advertising effectiveness benchmarks (AKA norms) to evaluate advertising performance is critical for staying ahead of the curve. Brands need answers to the questions below—and many others—to be confident in the success of their advertising strategies.
To answer these types of questions, normative benchmarks are essential. Benchmarks, by nature, are an amalgamation of data from historical ad campaigns that (presumably) tell researchers what “good” and “poor” performance looks like. Whether these historical ads are from your brand, immediate competitors, or the larger industry, their data enables answering a fairly straightforward question: are my specific advertisements outperforming a validated baseline? Unfortunately, if you base your norms on ancient data, outdated platforms, or invalidated assumptions, their value is null—if not harmful—for the organization.
Marketers need a strong playbook when considering analyzing and applying normative benchmarks.
Once critical questions about the quality, relevance, and applicability of benchmark data are effectively answered (see our report here), marketers face the seemingly endless possibilities of applying normative benchmarks to their campaigns. With an ocean of historical marketing campaigns to leverage and a multitude of analyses to consider, it’s important to prioritize benchmarking efforts that target critical organizational questions.
Your first step is to consider what type of organization you are—or what you aspire to be. If you’re a market leader with an established brand to consider, you may prioritize analyses tied to internal performance over time. If you’re an emerging brand with a story to tell, competitive performance on key awareness and brand recognition metrics is likely in order. And if you’re fighting for limited organizational dollars, you might try to prioritize everything!
But what are some ideal ways to leverage a high-quality normative dataset? And more importantly, how can these approaches help you answer the critical organizational questions above? Marketers should hone in on four primary applications:
Below, we unpack each use case and explain how each powers a unique and insightful view of campaign performance.
While we focus most of our playbook on leveraging norms from the broader industry (see sections 2-4), the first place to look for a clear view of performance is directly at yourself. Within-brand comparisons are powerful and enable contextualized views of performance that no normative database can provide. That said, to maximize the impact of this self-assessment, your ad effectiveness measurement must be sourced from a highly consistent source and methodology.
Single-source data is the optimal method for ensuring accurate comparisons across campaigns. If you’re testing brand lift for some campaigns with Partner A and others with Partner B, comparing the results across partners is rife with confounding variables. However, if you consolidate your testing to a singular partner and have a solid number of campaign studies under your belt, you can start peering into your brand’s benchmarks to see what “good” looks like.
Let’s say you’ve run 10 ad effectiveness projects with a singular research provider in the past year. Assuming these campaigns have distinct similarities (channel reach, spend, target audience, etc.), it’s entirely fair to build a pseudo-benchmark for those projects to compare new campaigns to your own average. To control for outliers—really great or really poor campaigns—take the median lift score you’ve observed across campaigns for a given metric and treat that as your running benchmark. You can now form meaningful conclusions about success and failure as you conduct new campaigns or evaluate historical ones.
Once they’ve looked at their own data, most marketers prefer to jump into specific categories or domains for benchmarking. You want to know how you’re doing against your most successful competitors, and that’s a pretty natural inclination. That said, before jumping head-first into those more specific areas of analysis, it’s critical to look at the overall benchmarks available to you at the highest levels of aggregation.
Why are overall benchmarks valuable? We list out a few factors below, some of which make them potentially more valuable than any other type of benchmarking data:
But no marketer will ever be fully satisfied with overarching norms. They also want to know how they’re stacking up against the biggest players in their category or industry. As such, category-level and industry-level benchmarks are essential to a marketer’s playbook, as they can help drive deeper insights and more compelling stories for their stakeholders.
Let’s consider an example of a major CPG brand that has just launched a new product. Internally, they know the product is a huge hit waiting to happen, and they’re equally bullish on the state of their ad campaign. As such, they partner with a preferred research provider to assess how the new advertisements lift various brand metrics. After the campaign concludes, they can see a 3-point lift in purchase intent when comparing exposed and matched-control consumers. Great result, right?
Well, it depends on what they decide to compare these results against.
They’ll be pleased to see that the overall benchmark for purchase intent across all campaigns is +2 points. So, their marketing strategy effectively outpaces the industry by 50%. As such, their decision to leverage an overall benchmark led to a positive, encouraging result that would reinforce the idea of continuing heavy investment in the ad spots.
They’ll be disappointed that the benchmark for their specific category is +4 points of purchase intent. In other words, they’re underperforming their category by 25%. When they share this information with stakeholders, they collectively decide to keep the campaign up since it is working overall but swap out the existing creative in favor of other, more successful ads that better showcase the brand's differentiation within the category.
The point of the above example is this: category benchmarks are not always consistent with larger—and potentially more reliable—overall norms. Understanding, communicating, and tracking these discrepancies are core to good benchmark applications. Some common differences by category and segment include:
If you're lucky enough to work with a research provider that has multiple ad-effectiveness metrics, a humbling challenge is merely focusing your attention on a smaller subset of benchmarks. While every normative metric can have incremental value to your organization, sharing a large set of benchmarks with stakeholders is not likely to go well. Leaders need distinct, actionable metrics that they can link to bottom-line performance, so highlighting specific metrics will positively impact the reception of your analysis.
But how should someone go about selecting the right metrics? Again, this primarily depends on the nuances of your specific stakeholders, company goals, and the industry you occupy. Large, established brands may not need to focus on awareness, as their top-of-funnel performance is not at issue (nor is it a focus of the advertising itself). Instead, they may see growth opportunities on lower-funnel metrics like purchase intent and site visitation. In contrast, emerging brands may get tremendous value from tracking and benchmarking their awareness lift, as current awareness numbers may artificially constrain down-funnel metrics.
The key advertising metrics you focus on should be the ones that:
Align with your organization and set clear goals for moving these metrics. Focus your reporting on the difference in the scores between your campaigns and these metrics’ benchmarks. With heightened attention and recurring examinations, you can align the entire organization on the metrics that matter, and positive performance will be more likely to be noticed.
Where are you engaging with benchmarks to drive organizational value?
Missing something from the checklist? Not to worry! DISQO regularly updates our ad effectiveness benchmarks that can replace your suboptimal legacy solutions. With full-funnel measurability, cross-channel visibility, and near-term recency, these benchmarks help marketers discover what “good” looks like within a modern ad campaign and test themselves against that standard.
Instead of relying on antiquated solutions, learn more about how DISQO’s ad effectiveness measurement sets a new standard for campaign evaluation. Contact us for a walkthrough today, and download our most recent report to see what you might be missing.