How to perform advertising research to measure campaign impact

Find out if your target audience is receiving the right message. Avoid spending money on ineffective advertising. Or, ensure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns—all with advertising research. 

Let’s review what advertising research is, how and when to conduct it, and analyze its impact on your brand.

Advertising research is a type of market research concentrated on the performance of ad campaigns. It is used to identify what ads will be the most effective before an ad campaign, monitor brand health while it’s running, and analyze the success of a campaign after it is finished.

The overarching goal of advertising research is to increase your understanding of your customers, so that you can provide ads that show how and why your product best meets their needs. This type of research can also help you determine the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and help you increase the cost-effectiveness of launching those campaigns. The most common reason companies do advertising research is to find out if the advertising they do is meeting company objectives.

Advertising research yields benefits throughout the campaign development process across three main stages: pre-launch, in-light, and post-campaign.

Pre-campaign advertising research includes in-depth research of your target audience, concept and theme testing, message testing, copy, and creative testing, and more. All of the research before the campaign launch is dedicated to getting to know the target market better and determining what advertising will have the most impact. A great deal of your data will come from market research surveys.

The stages of development included in pre-campaign advertising research are: