Time to Start Measuring Radio Campaigns
Between 1991 and 2001, I created 800+ radio commercials and promos each year. It wasn’t unusual to go into a session where they’d have up to 5 scripts lined up for 30 different car dealers. We’d cut the main copy and tag each spot with a name and location. Grocery chains, jewelery stores, fast food groups, I was the”voice” – and many times the creative person – behind all of them, when radio advertising’s afterburners were lit.
That’s quite a few radio commericals for any one person to do. Not all were great, but more than a few were considered memorable and successful. I’ve been granted a Southern California Broadcasters award, an Arbitron “Great Radio Promotion” award, one from the Cleveland Ad Club, and an Air Award “Best Campaign of the Year,” yada, yada, yada.
Producing such a quantity of spots gives me a qualification to comment on the state of radio commercials. Esthetically, or by response rates, I know how to create and what to expect from radio industry commercials.
Another item I’m fairly close to is internet advertising. I’ve become somewhat of an expert in the analytics and metrics it uses, and how to assemble vast amounts of data into an easily digested picture. For internet campaigns, this data graph directly affects actions which increase or decrease each ad campaign’s budget.
Advertising has never had an exact measurement technique to quantify success or failure within a radio environment. I know through personal experience that radio advertising was pursued, in many cases, so business owners could hear their name on the radio. They simply did not look at pre-and-post sales numbers or do anything that resembled post-campaign analysis.
Though it’s taken five paragraphs to reach this topic, post-campaign analysis is exactly what will occur for one of my clients in the coming weeks.
For a second time, Audio Graphics has created a radio advertising campaign with the sole objective of determining response from an over-the-air radio schedule. Please don’t mistake this as a boast that this form of measurement is ironclad and solid. It’s still in its embryonic stage, but pointing to where analytics, metrics, and the radio industry are about to meet.
“Visit _____.com/tax for details on increasing profits.”
The above URL is a landing page call-to-action that will appear in one radio campaign. The client’s name is removed. The page won’t be spidered by search engines. It won’t have a link from the client’s web site.
If all goes as planned, “_____.com/tax” will only be accessible when someone types in this URL and is therefore able to give at least one response metric.
Don’t stop with visitor response as the “success” metric, though, because there will be multiple layers of response metrics: requests for information, package sales, time on page, and ROI (calculated after the campaign is closed and the dollars are counted).
As stated, this form of analytics and metrics as applied to the radio industry is in an embryonic stage. To date, even when using internet radio advertising, there’s not much being done with assessments and actions after the numbers are turned over to a client. That’s what I’m concentrating on now, with broadcaster radio.
While radio industry trades keep pounding away at PPM, Audio Graphics will talk about how to use the internet as an ad campaign quantifier. I’ll stand behind the thought that it doesn’t matter how many people you reach, it’s the percentage of a group that reaches back which matters most to advertisers.
Once we get this next test campaign analyzed, we’ll all be a little wiser and closer to quanitfying the benefits of a radio advertising campaign. Hopefully, the radio industry will gain respect from this process, and radio will sell a little more advertising because results can be measured.
By Ken Dardis
Audiographics.com
View The Source
