Increasing your Offline ROI with TV Tracking

Analyzing Offline-Marketing like TV-Campaigns

The Online world is no longer measured or judged separately. Online and Offline Marketing actions are combined in 360 Overviews of Marketing campaigns – or at least they should be combined. And, as we know Online influences Offline as well as Offline influences Online. That said, it is important to create an analytical insight and enable marketing details on a level that generates more value – leading to clearer Marketing budget decisions and improved ROI.

Marketing Budget Allocation based on Analytics

Why should you invest in a TV spot which can easily cost more than 200.000 Dollars – and I am only talking about the media cost for a single commercial, not the production, actor salary, special effects or repeat airings? You really need to ask yourself about the value of the TV channel.

This channel needs to justify its existence within the marketing channel mix you are addressing parallel to your campaign plan. By analyzing the TV campaigns and including those insights in your analytics solution, you can easily judge the value of TV – and the monetarization of the TV budget.

Online Turnover through TV Commercials

A high-end analytics system should be able to include the TV streaming slots in order to combine this data with, for example, online turnover, website behavior and visitor interaction. So it is ideal if you can upload/import this TV information to the system.

The TV user watches the TV spot and sees the brand or product or Web-call to action. Then this person uses the second screen (which more and more people do: Simultaneous Usage of Tablet and TV) to interact with that brand or product. This visit can be analyzed and allocated to the TV commercial.

In order to judge the quality and quantity of this traffic generated by the TV commercial the following method can be used: analyzing the traffic in the time frame 5 minutes before the spot and  comparing it to the traffic generated 5 minutes after the start of the TV spot. You will see (in general) that channels like campaign-generated traffic and eMail traffic (Newsletter) do not increase. But, on the on the other hand, the traffic of the channels Search Engine (paid and/or organic) as well as the direct entry will rise. This fact is based on the watching behavior of the TV-audience. It is quite easy to remember a brand or product and to search for it on one of the search engines or type the brand directly. No one would search for “Apple” after watching an Apple spot, they would directly insert www.apple.com to access the Apple website quickly and directly.

TV generating relevant Online-Traffic

From the traffic that was generated within the time frame of 5 minutes after the commercial was shown needs to be deducted the amount of traffic that was generated 5 minutes before this commercial. The gap easily shows you the increased traffic due to your TV marketing and the additionally generated turnover or newsletter registrations or downloads show you the quality of this audience. The nice thing is not only the advantage of including Offline Campaigns into Online Research but also judging the different TV stations based on this traffic. To allocate the TV advertising budget to drive more sales or more traffic might be the most cost-effective way to increase the Marketing performance and the ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment).

This opens possibilities, benefits and limits of a new approach for measuring payoff or breakdown of television (and radio) advertisement because still the Marketing channel TV is the channel with the highest investment. With an application of digital multichannel measurement, it is now possible for the first time to reconstruct the aftermath of TV advertising online. The variance of visits around a TV-advertisement can be measured, sharply and pointed. By using this new technology, uncertainty about the effort of expensive TV advertisement, is set to be a thing of the past.