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How to measure advertising effectiveness—and why it matters

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Knowing how to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns can help you fine-tune your business strategy. Learn why and how to measure your campaigns in order to take meaningful action.

Any investment—whether a brand new car, an air fryer, or a killer advertising campaign—needs to be measured against some kind of baseline or expectation, in order to determine success. If you’re driving that same car seven years later without so much as a scrape or a new tire—and your last ride gave in after five years—that’s a good return on investment (ROI). If that same day you go home and make a perfectly fluffy pancake with that air fryer—and the warranty expired after two years—that’s a good ROI too.

For marketers, good ROI is what it’s all about. So, knowing how to measure the effectiveness of advertising after—or even during—a campaign is a must. You can assess strengths and weaknesses, and optimise your strategy based on campaign learnings to maximise that all-important ROI.

How you measure success depends on a number of variables: What’s your campaign objective? Who’s your target audience? How do you intend to reach them? What do you want them to do? Gathering feedback, insights and data before, during and after an advertising campaign—no matter what channel you’re running it on—is crucial to know for sure if your marketing strategies are working in the long term.

Read on for tips on how to measure advertising effectiveness, and specific directions on how to measure the success of an advertising campaign on Spotify.

The importance of measuring advertisement effectiveness

Ad measurement is an essential component in answering questions like:

• Are we reaching the right audience?
• How are our ads impacting brand awareness and consumer perceptions?
• Are our ads memorable?
• Did our ads influence a purchase decision?
• Are our ads driving prospects down the sales funnel?

These are just a few examples—the effectiveness of an advertising campaign can be measured in many ways. The more information you have, the better—because the ability to make data-driven decisions based on real-world evidence is the key to success. By gathering valuable data about your target audience, you can more accurately measure campaign effectiveness. Here are some different ways to do it:

Reach

Reach refers to the total number of people who saw or heard your ad, at least once. You’ll be able to see how many people in each target segment were exposed to your ad, and potentially break that number down further by looking at demographics such as age, gender and location, or interests, device type, and so on. This will help you fine-tune future campaigns and targeting efforts to ensure you’re reaching the right audiences.

Impressions

If your goal is to serve your ad as many times as possible—no matter how many times a single person sees or hears it—you should measure impressions to determine success. This way, you have a shot at hitting the “sweet spot” where listeners are exposed just enough to drive interest and move them along the sales funnel—but not so much that they become overexposed and lose interest. Keeping track of the frequency at which listeners are exposed to your Spotify ads helps you develop a deeper understanding of their streaming habits, and tailor future campaigns to target the right people with the right amount of ads at the right time.

Clicks

If you intend to prioritise lower-funnel objectives like website visits, you’ll want to measure ad effectiveness through the number or rate of clicks from your ad. With Spotify ads, you can drive clicks from display and video formats, and leverage call-to-action (CTA) cards to drive further click activity. These CTA cards are dynamic, clickable elements that visually resurface your message throughout the user's digital audio experience, when the app is in focus.

Brand metrics

How do you ensure your target audience is perceiving your ad and understanding your brand the way you want them to? An effective way to understand if an ad resonates with your target audience is to ask them how they think and feel about it. In fact, by surveying both exposed and control audiences, brand lift studies are an effective way to analyse the incremental impact that your ads had on driving upper-funnel metrics like awareness, favourability, and intent. You can then use this data to ensure future campaigns hit the mark and send the right message.

Conversions

Even lower down the funnel are conversions—the ultimate goal of any business with a product or service to sell. But conversions may not necessarily refer to sales. They may also include contact form submissions, webpage visits, add-to-cart actions, newsletter signups, or one-sheeter downloads. Using the Spotify Pixel, you can better understand whether or not your campaign led to a positive Return On Investment (ROI). Perhaps some ads performed extremely well, and others fell flat. Why? Understanding this can help you craft even better campaigns in the future, combining the most successful elements of the ads that performed well with new elements that you want to test.

How to measure the effectiveness of advertising with Spotify Ad Analytics

A centralised attribution and reporting platform, Spotify Ad Analytics helps you understand your campaign’s performance across all ad formats on Spotify, or wherever else you’re investing your audio advertising budget, for free.

What’s more, you can leverage the Spotify Pixel to provide conversion tracking and attribution across all ad formats on Spotify, for both music and podcasts—while the Spotify Brand Lift dashboard enables you to evaluate how you’re growing your brand with KPIs such as Ad Recall, Awareness, and Consideration.

In short, Spotify Ad Analytics lets you:
• Measure all of your ads on Spotify across music and podcasts
• Learn from your digital audio campaigns off Spotify on the fly
• Get actionable insights in real–time, all in one centralized dashboard
• Access lift reporting to understand the effectiveness of your ads
• Leverage our first-party insights for a holistic view of the unique listeners you reached

Drive the highest impact with Spotify ads

Audio advertising can be immensely beneficial to brands, offering a wide reach and audience targeting capabilities. And you can rely on Spotify to help get your message heard:

  • 93%

    of the brain’s engagement with the content on Spotify is transferred directly into ad engagement.¹

    Source: 1. Spotify x Neuro-Insight, Sonic Science Volume 1, June 2021

  • 70%

    listeners agree that Spotify aids in their path to purchase.²

    Source: 2. Spotify x, Consumer Decision Journey, August 2023

Measure results that matter to your business.

From branding to performance, across all ad formats on Spotify, learn how to measure advertising effectiveness by reaching out to a Spotify Advertising specialist today.

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