I Just Launched My Campaign, Is It Working?

By Stu Girgins, VP, Client Consulting, NCS

“Causality,” (cau·sal·i·ty) the relationship between cause and effect; 

“Incrementality,” (in-cre-men-tal-i-ty) the quantification of cause and effect.

Words like these are often used to describe the outcomes of an advertising campaign, but what do these academic words actually mean from a research perspective, and how do they help marketers?

Is my ad campaign working? Will my campaign drive more/incremental sales?  These are the questions on every marketer’s mind as soon as a campaign launches. In the past, marketers of brands were left in the dark until sometime after the campaign concluded. Then, they would conduct an in-depth, post-campaign analysis to know how their advertising worked. Yes, these post-campaign solutions measure the additional sales due to advertising, answering “did my advertising cause an increase in sales?” These marketing research offerings, some better than others, can give brands deep and complex insights into what worked and what to improve on in the future. But it is all hindsight. As far as active, in-flight media, we are still left to wonder, is my campaign working now?

Publishers and platforms have done their best to offer advertisers performance metrics and insights into what the campaign is doing. Are the ads viewable? How many users have been reached? How frequently is a single person seeing an ad? Trading teams and account managers use these soft metrics to make adjustments, as well as optimize the performance of the ad in the hopes that a better ad experience will drive more sales. Do these in-flight changes in ad performance cause an increase in sales? Marketers have long been given levers to adjust campaigns, but they are still left to wonder if their actions are actually increasing sales.  

Until now…

NCS Sales Lift Metrics, the newest product in the NCS Optimize Solutions Suite, finally empowers marketers with the answer they’ve been looking for — providing incremental sales for specific campaign tactics while in-flight. 

Our CEO, Linda Dupree, explains why Sales Lift Metrics is a game changer for the marketplace.

“As an advertiser, our budgets are often evaluated based on our ability to drive sales of our products. Historically, as an industry, we have been limited to using top-of funnel-KPIs [viewability, reach, etc.] to optimize our media in-flight. That left us always asking ‘Which metric is most correlated with incremental sales?,'” points out Paul Gelb, head of programmatic and social at big pharma marketer Bayer. 

Enter NCS Sales Lift Metrics. These reports help marketers understand which creative is driving more sales, which audiences are buying more product and which media placements are the most effective. According to Gelb, this is exactly what these new metrics will enable for Bayer. They will use Sales Lift Metrics to evaluate the performance of their media, creative and other elements of their campaigns on incremental sales, while the campaign is live.

The incremental sales incurred by your advertising are no longer static post-campaign measures. NCS Sales Lift Metrics has turned causality and incrementality, from abstract concepts into tools marketers can use for immediate action. 

Marketers can now make adjustments to their campaigns while in-flight, and they can OPTIMIZE knowing specifically what tactics are driving incremental sales. We are no longer left to wonder and wait…. NCS Sales Lift Metrics answer the question, which aspects of my ad campaign can I optimize to drive incremental sales and all while the campaign is still running!

Reach out to us today for more information.