Samstag, 30. Januar 2010

TV impact on visitor curve

As our January campaign came with a bigger budget, we had the chance to do research on some major prime time spot events, as for example during the German TV premiere of "Rush Hour 3" and "Next".

We combined the visitor curve 10 minutes before to 20 minutes after airing of 18 prime time spots. Each of them had a minimum reach of 1 Million viewers. You can see the results in the attached diagram.


The red curve shows the unique visitors. As you can see the effect already starts during the spot, with a peak in minute one. Interesting is that the short term spot effect ends very soon. After only 5 minutes more than 95% of the effect is covered. The search event (green) shows nearly the same behaviour only 2 minutes delayed. The curve of the click out (sales) event is much more flattened with a little peak in minute four. The effect is still very visible after 20 minutes and holds on for an even longer time.

Even so you could generally expect an outcome like this, the extend in which the effect of TV triggered visitors can be cut down to only five minutes after the spot surprised us. And so it led to some major changes in the way we measure TV success.

All effects are factor related to each other. These factors are quite constant over time as long as you do not change something in the structure of your page or do a big change in the creatives. So you can always calculate sales as a factor of searches as a factor of visitors.

Some might say that sales is the only important figure to measure. Sure. The question is what is the best way to measure it.

It depends on what you do, but sales events might be pretty rare. With let's say a visitor conversion of 1% you have to attract a lot of visitors with a spot to get into an area where volatility is not an important factor anymore. For example a prime time spot reaching 2 million visitors might results in 1000 short term visitors on your web page and with a conversion rate of 1% lead to 10 sales. Sometimes you will have 5 and another time 15 sales, but is that something you would like to base your decision on if a spot does pay out?

With a conversion of 1% the accuracy in which you can measure visitors is 100 times higher than the accuracy of measuring sales events. If you take the finding above into account, that the distribution of sales event is much more flattened as the peak in visitors, this ratio gets even higher.

Doing a TV campaign with 50 spots a day you will definitely not be able to separate the sales effects of each spot, but you will nearly always be able to separate the visitor effects. So the failure in your data by extrapolating visitor to sales events will be much lower than the failure of attributing a to high/low effect due to the randomness of small numbers.

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