There is a persistent myth in the advertising world that outdoor advertising (OOH) campaigns cannot be measured beyond basic metrics. In fact, when it comes to precise performance metrics, OOH is as measurable as its digital marketing counterparts.
Advanced planning, tracking, and measurement tools allow OOH advertisers to track and isolate individual OOH inventory units, directly attribute online and offline conversions, and accurately measure return on investment ( KING). And today, OOH advertisers can monitor and make on-the-spot adjustments to optimize their outdoor advertising campaigns in real time.
As ad departments face increasing scrutiny of their marketing budgets, it’s critical they have the data they need to support their decisions. Digital may have been the wave of the recent past, but it’s getting more and more expensive as results dwindle. If you’re looking to broaden your media mix to increase brand awareness and drive consumer action, it’s time to dig deeper into OOH. Decisions about your entire media mix depend on performance. Here’s a detailed look at how you can gauge the performance of your next OOH campaign.
Measurement methodologies
OOH is a performance chain like never before. With the right OOH media buying partner, you can understand: Was our OOH advertising campaign successful? Did more people take action than if we hadn’t run the campaign? Did our campaign work and to what extent? Which components of our campaign worked best?
Advertisers typically turn to two high-level categories of analytics to measure campaign performance: impact and attribution. Lift analysis uses experimentation to isolate the impact of your OOH campaign on business results, and it can be used to measure the success of a specific marketing channel against other channels in the media mix. an advertiser. Digging even deeper, attribution analysis examines the components of OOH campaigns to determine which individual ad units perform best, giving advertisers insights they can use to optimize ad campaigns.
These two approaches complement each other and can be used simultaneously. Attribution is best for daily, always-on metrics, while many run-enhancement scans are more sporadic – after initial experimentation to prove that OOH support works.
Metrics to Consider
Next to How? ‘Or’ What you measure, you also need to consider What you measure.
These approaches to measuring outdoor campaign performance rely heavily on a variety of different metrics, including:
- prints: This is the number of times consumers see an advertisement. In the OOH industry, impressions are measured by considering the amount of traffic that passes through a particular ad unit and the results of eye-tracking experiments that reveal the percentage of drivers who actually see the ad unit. Today, most outdoor advertising companies rely on the non-profit organization Geopath for all OOH print data. Geopath’s mission is to independently audit and report OOH advertising ratings across the United States.
- Range and frequency: Reach and frequency are commonly used metrics across almost all media channels. Reach is the number of unique people in a particular market who are exposed to an OOH ad unit at least once over a specified period of time. Frequency is the number of times affected individuals are exposed to the OOH ad unit during the same time period.
- Raw Rating Points (GRP): GRPs are a standard advertising metric used to track exposure within a specific geographic market. They represent the total number of in-market impressions generated by an OOH campaign, expressed as a percentage of a market population. For example, a rating point or GRP means that you have reached 1% of the market population. GRPs are calculated by taking the percentage of the market reached multiplied by the frequency.
- Target Rating Points (TRPs): TRPs are essentially just a refinement of GRPs, which only consider your target audience. For example, a TRP means that you have reached 1% of your target audience within the market population. TRPs are a quick measure of how many people in a target audience an OOH ad or campaign has reached and how many times.
- Results: This is actually a category of metrics, but it’s one of the most important because it relates directly to your unique business goals. When identifying specific outcomes to measure, first consider what you are trying to achieve. Is it an in-store, e-commerce or mobile sale? Do you see consumers visiting a physical place? Is it site traffic? Or are you trying to get consumers to interact with your social media accounts and create a social buzz?
- Halo effect: Unlike the methods listed above, which measure the direct impacts of a campaign, the halo effect measures the indirect impacts (or benefits) that OOH has on your other marketing channels. Of course, these indirect measurements can get complicated, but some OOH media buying platforms make it easy, in part through direct integrations with other platforms.
Rising digital advertising costs, coupled with the responsibility to be extra diligent with every dollar spent, means the pressure is on advertisers to prove that what they are doing works. With the ability to measure the actual performance of OOH ad campaigns, outdoor advertising should not be overlooked as a crucial part of your overall media mix. There’s never been a better time to tap into the performance power of OOH.
