The Return on Brand Impact: Getting to the bottom-line of mobile brand metrics

Brand metrics often unfairly get referred to as “soft” metrics, as if the only measures that can tell you something hard and concrete about the effectiveness of media spend are ones to which you can attribute an observable action or a cost. There’s nothing soft about a soft metric however. Time and again the significant and vital impact that long term brand spend has on tangible business outcomes has been proven across virtually all media. Most notably Field and Binet’s “Long and Short of It” paper for the IPA advocates as much as a 60:40 budget split between long term brand and short term response spend, such are the power of “soft” measures.

Brand metrics often unfairly get referred to as “soft” metrics, as if the only measures that can tell you something hard and concrete about the effectiveness of media spend are ones to which you can attribute an observable action or a cost. There’s nothing soft about a soft metric however. Time and again the significant and vital impact that long term brand spend has on tangible business outcomes has been proven across virtually all media. Most notably Field and Binet’s “Long and Short of It” paper for the IPA advocates as much as a 60:40 budget split between long term brand and short term response spend, such are the power of “soft” measures.

The debate around how best to capture brand effectiveness using behavioural metrics still rages, with many advocating the use of vCPM measures that incorporate viewability scores in to traditional pricing models. While viewability is undoubtedly an important step in the evolution of how we measure brand online, it merely represents the tip of the ice berg (the tip of that iceberg being the 50% of an ad required to be in view for one second to qualify as viewable) in terms of measuring brand it should be viewed as a hygiene factor and not a true measure of effectiveness.

The truest measure of brand impact still involves comparing the surveyed attitudinal responses of consumers who have been exposed to ads versus those who have not. While this is far from an alien concept to many big brand spenders online, few are actually applying the results of brand test to campaign financials and buy-details. Using just a few simple formulas, On Device Research can now provide insight in to the cost and return of brand spend at a campaign level which in turn should start to provide a “harder” approach to campaign evaluation that speaks about brand impact in the language of digital performance marketing.

The new metrics that On Device Research will be introducing are as follows:

  1. Cost per Brand Uplift (CPBU): The cost required to achieve a 1% point (delta) improvement in purchase intent.
  2. Cost per Potential Purchaser (CPPP): A branding equivalent to a cost per acquisition. Essentially a measure of the cost taken to make an additional person say that they are likely to purchase your brand following campaign exposure.
  3. Return on Brand Impact (ROBI): By dividing a figure of value for every potential new purchaser, by the CPPP, a return on brand impact score can be expressed as the potential amount of return achieved from £1 of brand spend.
  4. Total Potential Campaign Return (TPCR): The total potential value of sales generated by the campaign can be calculated by multiplying the number of new potential purchasers by a figure of lifetime value per purchaser

alt text Figure 1: Example of how new campaign value metrics apply to Brand X


Clearly there is only so much that a surveyed CPPP figure can be compared to an observed CPA figure developed through the performance marketing discipline, yet at the same time clients who start to build out this approach and build up their own benchmarks will begin to create a fuller understanding of the impact of digital brand spend on their bottom-line.

To find out more about introducing On Device Research’s new campaign value metrics in to your reporting, please get in touch with On Device Research today: / +44(0)20 7278 6627 / [ondeviceresearch.com/mobile-brand-impact](https://ondeviceresearch.com/mobile-brand-impact)

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