Gabby Donnelly
Understanding shopper media performance can be challenging at times. With retailers being protective of data and campaigns being ‘multi-media’ in nature, it is not surprising that isolating a given media’s impact on sales is tough. Despite this, the evaluation of shopper media is exceptionally important with brands being increasingly challenged to prove return on investment. As experts in shopper media analysis, below are some top tips to unlock the insight you want.
Set your analysis questions up-front: At campaign planning stage, before any media bookings are made ensure you have a clear view of the questions you would like answered across any campaign review. Since, with this view in mind you can ensure your campaign is set up to facilitate the evaluations you want. Why? Control verses exposed store evaluation work provides the most accurate view of performance but in order to complete the campaign store list must allow for the analysis in questions i.e. there must be an appropriate set of control verses exposed stores. What does this mean? When placing media bookings, brands should be prescriptive around which stores they would like media to go live in.
Be proactive: To ensure accuracy across control versus exposed store results it is important to input correct activity store lists. From experience, secondary space store lists as well as final, compliance store lists for media are two pain points with regards to briefing. Our top tip here is simply to be proactive in this area. Requesting secondary space lists from Trading teams, before an activity’s live date is likely to receive a swifter response than if the request is made a few weeks or even months post activation. The same goes for compliance lists, request a view of these as soon as they are available from relevant media owners.
Get into the detail: Across campaign planning and implementation track all media activation details in one central resource i.e. cost, coverage, live date, end date, featured SKU, final artwork etc. In this way you’ll be able to decrease evaluation briefing time and more swiftly unlock the learning you desire.
In sum, proactively planning ahead for evaluation work in shopper is crucial to ensure teams unlock the most relevant learnings for the campaign or brand in question.