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How Media Agencies Can Track TV for Improved DR Campaigns.

We all know that TV advertising makes brands famous.  A recognisable brand is great, but what about direct response advertisers who need viewers to convert to trackable sales?  Reliably tracking ROI generated by a DR TV campaign has long been a challenge for media agencies and their clients.

Do you feel like you’re taking a leap of faith when running a TV ad campaign? It’s all very well knowing that you’re getting your message out there but how do you prove a campaign’s success without trackable results? If your media agency is doing their job, they should be telling you exactly how your campaign is performing. Read on to find out how.

Can TV deliver for direct response advertisers?

In short, yes.  TV has ALWAYS been able to deliver for DR advertisers. The good news is technology today makes tracking those all important sales easier than ever.  As we become increasingly digital, a unique phone number might not cut it but thanks to some very smart developers we now have software that lets you see exactly how well your TV campaign is performing.

Tracking systems such as Adalyser and TVSquared enable TV advertisers and media agencies identify the best performing channels, programmes, day of the week, time length, creative etc. These systems allow media agencies to refine and optimise a TV campaign better than ever before.

How does tracking software work?

We won’t even try to explain the incredibly sophisticated background algorithms. In a nutshell, a baseline level of activity is established by placing a tracking pixel is placed on the advertiser’s website site before the campaign goes live. The spot schedule for the campaign is uploaded to tell the system what ads are running and when. When TV advertising starts, the uplift in site traffic compared to baseline is measured and the system uses the algorithms to allocate these additional site visits back to individual spots.

This software doesn’t just measure site visits. Pixels can also track multiple actions such as brochure downloads, appointment requests and sales. If it happens on your site, you can usually measure it and attribute it.

How do media agencies use this information to improve campaign performance?

We strongly believe that direct response adverts across ALL media should be tracked, always!  Better tracking means more knowledge, more knowledge means we can optimise and refine your media campaigns.  Continually improved media campaigns ultimately lead to better ROI.  

Basically, if we know what works we do more of it, if we can see what’s not working we do less of it.  It’s not rocket science but it’s amazing how many advertisers think that tracking responses is more hassle than it’s worth.  Systems such as Adalyser do all the hard work for us. This means not only do our clients end up with finely tuned schedules that deliver sales but also we’ve been able to prove the case for TV, time and time again.

Contact us to find out more about running TV campaigns that deliver trackable results. If you want to learn more about AJ’s approach to TV advertising read our post here .