Category: Analytics

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, marketers are tasked with juggling countless metrics to understand their brand’s position in the market. Amid the noise of KPIs like click-through rates and conversion rates, one tool stands out for its ability to provide a holistic picture: brand health tracking. This powerful practice offers marketers actionable insights into how their brand is perceived, its strengths, and areas for improvement.

At Do Loco, we believe that a well-monitored brand is a thriving brand. Let’s dive into why brand health tracking is essential for marketers and share real-world examples of its impact.

What Is Brand Health Tracking?

Brand health tracking involves the continuous measurement of your brand’s performance across key metrics such as awareness, consideration, preference, and loyalty. It’s more than just an analysis of raw data; it’s about understanding the emotional and functional connections consumers have with your brand.

Key indicators of brand health include:

• Brand Awareness: How many people know your brand exists?
• Brand Consideration: Are people willing to choose your brand over competitors?
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely are customers to recommend your brand to others?
• Customer Sentiment: How do people feel about your brand?

Benefits of Brand Health Tracking for Marketers

1. Data-Driven Decision Making: Tracking brand health gives marketers concrete data to inform strategies. By understanding what drives customer loyalty or dissatisfaction, brands can refine campaigns and allocate resources effectively. For example, a global e-commerce company leveraged brand health metrics to assess the effectiveness of their holiday campaign. When the data showed an uptick in awareness but no corresponding increase in purchase intent, they pivoted to more conversion-focused messaging, driving a 15% increase in sales.
2. Competitive Benchmarking Brand health tracking doesn’t just measure your performance; it also provides context by benchmarking against competitors. This helps marketers identify opportunities to differentiate and stay ahead. One tech company’s brand tracker revealed they lagged in consideration compared to a key competitor. They launched a targeted campaign emphasizing unique features, resulting in a 20% boost in consideration scores within three months.
3. Enhanced Customer Retention Loyal customers are the lifeblood of any business. By tracking loyalty metrics, brands can identify at-risk segments and deploy retention strategies. This came into play 1st hand for a popular subscription-based service company that noticed a drop in NPS among long-term subscribers. Further investigation revealed dissatisfaction with outdated features. A product update, combined with a personalized re-engagement campaign, reduced churn by 25%.

How Often Should You Analyze Brand Health Data?

At Do Loco, we recommend analyzing brand health data on a quarterly basis. While conducting surveys or collecting data monthly can be valuable, analyzing this data too frequently can lead to overreacting to short-term fluctuations or “blips.” A quarterly cadence allows marketers to identify meaningful trends and patterns without being misled by noise in the data.

Each quarterly analysis should integrate additional data sources to provide a comprehensive view of brand performance. This can include metrics such as web traffic, sales figures, Google Trends data, and media performance (paid and organic). By combining these insights, marketers can craft a cohesive narrative about their brand’s health and make informed decisions to drive growth.

Getting Started with Brand Health Tracking

To unlock the benefits of brand health tracking, consider these steps:

1. Define Key Metrics: Focus on metrics that align with your business objectives.
2. Leverage Technology: Use tools like surveys, social listening, and analytics platforms to gather data.
3. Establish a Benchmark: Understand your current brand health to measure progress over time.
4. Monitor Regularly: Consistent tracking ensures you stay ahead of trends and challenges.
5. Act on Insights: Data is only as valuable as the actions it inspires. Use your findings to adjust strategies in real-time.

The Loco take: Brand Tracking is A MUST

Brand health tracking is not just a buzzword; it’s an essential practice for any marketer aiming to build a resilient and customer-centric brand no matter the size of the brand. By identifying trends, addressing challenges proactively, and optimizing strategies, you can ensure your brand’s long-term success.

At Do Loco, we’re passionate about empowering marketers to make data-driven decisions that lead to impactful outcomes.

In a world where marketing dollars are scrutinized more than ever, ensuring that your advertising investments drive real results is paramount. Incrementality testing—a methodology designed to measure the true impact of media campaigns—has emerged as a vital tool for modern marketers. By leveraging audience hold-out groups or testing at a DMA (Designated Market Area) or regional level, brands can gain invaluable insights into the effectiveness of their advertising efforts. Here’s why incrementality testing matters, how it works, and why it should be a staple in your media strategy.

What is Incrementality Testing?

Incrementality testing is a measurement strategy that isolates the impact of your media campaigns by comparing the behavior of two distinct groups: those exposed to your advertising and those not exposed (the hold-out group). This approach helps determine whether your marketing efforts are truly driving incremental results, such as increased sales, higher web traffic, or greater brand awareness—results that wouldn’t have occurred without your advertising.

How Incrementality Testing Works

There are two primary approaches to incrementality testing:

1. Audience Hold-Out Groups: In this method, a portion of your target audience is deliberately excluded from seeing your campaign. By comparing their behavior to that of the exposed audience, you can directly measure the incremental lift driven by your media efforts.
2. DMA or Regional Testing: Instead of individual audience groups, this approach divides geographic regions into test (exposed) and control (non-exposed) groups. By analyzing performance metrics across these regions, brands can gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns on a larger scale.

Best Practices for Incrementality Testing

While the concept is straightforward, executing incrementality tests effectively requires meticulous planning and execution. Here are some key considerations:

1. Careful Selection of Control and Test Groups:
   • When using audience hold-outs, ensure the excluded group is representative of your overall audience. This minimizes bias and ensures accurate results.
   • For DMA or regional testing, select test and control markets that share similar characteristics—such as demographics, purchasing behaviors, and media consumption patterns—to reduce variability.
2. Focus on Measurable KPIs:
   • Define clear metrics for success, whether it’s sales lift, cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or brand recall.
   • Ensure that your measurement tools can capture the necessary data accurately and in real time.
3. Allow Adequate Testing Time:
   • Incrementality testing requires time to gather meaningful data. Short test windows may not account for seasonal or behavioral fluctuations.
4. Control External Variables:
   • Be mindful of factors like competitor activity, economic shifts, or major events that could influence results.

Why Incrementality Testing Matters

In an era of performance marketing, where every dollar spent is scrutinized, incrementality testing ensures that CMOs and marketing executives have the data to make informed decisions. This approach goes beyond surface-level metrics like clicks or impressions, revealing the actual impact of your media campaigns on business outcomes.

By identifying what’s working and what’s not, incrementality testing empowers brands to:

• Optimize media budgets for maximum ROI.
• Avoid wasting resources on tactics that don’t drive meaningful results.
• Build confidence in their advertising strategies during boardroom discussions.

The Loco tAKE: iNCREMENTALITY TESTING IS A MUST

At Do Loco, we believe incrementality testing should be a cornerstone of every media strategy. We recommend that brands conduct these tests at least once or twice a year to continuously recalibrate and refine their advertising efforts. This ensures campaigns remain effective amid changing market dynamics and consumer behavior.

When testing at a DMA or regional level, we stress the importance of selecting test and control locations carefully. Similarity between these groups is critical to ensure accurate results and actionable insights. While these tests require additional time and resources upfront, the payoff is significant: CMOs and marketing executives can walk into board meetings equipped with robust, data-driven proof of their advertising’s effectiveness.

Incrementality testing is not just a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have for brands that want to lead with confidence, maximize their marketing investments, and deliver measurable impact. At Do Loco, we’re committed to helping our clients harness the power of this approach to drive meaningful business outcomes.

In a fragmented, always-on media landscape, capturing consumer attention has never been more challenging — or more crucial. As the advertising ecosystem evolves, so must the metrics we use to gauge success. At Do Loco, we believe attention measurement represents the next frontier in media effectiveness. It’s not just about reaching audiences; it’s about engaging them in a meaningful, measurable way.

Why Attention Measurement Matters

Traditionally, media plans have focused on impressions and reach as key performance indicators. But these metrics tell only part of the story. An “opportunity to see” doesn’t guarantee an ad will be viewed, let alone resonate. A research study has shown 85% of advertising today fails to achieve the 2.5 seconds of attention needed for consumers to form even a preliminary takeaway.

Attention is more than a buzzword; it’s a critical driver of advertising’s impact. Studies show a strong relationship between attention and key brand metrics such as awareness, favorability, and purchase intent. For instance, one case study from a major DTC brand revealed that optimizing for attention led to significant lifts in brand favorability (+10.7%) and purchase intent (+6.1%) without increasing budgets. These results underscore the potential for attention-based planning to drive efficiency and effectiveness.

Moving Beyond Traditional Metrics

The current reliance on impressions often fails to account for how fleeting and unsustained attention can dilute campaign outcomes. At Do Loco, we advocate for a paradigm shift: moving from impressions as an opportunity to see to impressions as a verified human view. Attention measurement provides the framework to achieve this.

Key benefits of attention measurement include:

• Enhanced Efficiency: Optimizing media buys based on attention metrics reduces waste and drives more impactful placements.
• Deeper Insights: Attention data provides granular insights into which channels, formats, and creatives resonate most with audiences.
• Actionable Results: By correlating attention with brand lift studies, advertisers can align media strategies with tangible business outcomes.

The Role of Technology and Partners

A growing roster of measurement partners is shaping the attention economy, each with unique methodologies and capabilities. Leaders in this space include Adelaide, Amplified Intelligence, Lumen, and TVision. These partners leverage technologies such as eye-tracking, machine learning, and impression tagging to provide robust, actionable data.

• Adelaide: Pioneering cross-channel attention metrics, Adelaide’s Attention Unit (AU) combines algorithmic modeling with data from TVision, Lumen, and Tobii studies. Their holistic approach spans digital, linear TV, and emerging channels like podcast audio and in-app video.
• Amplified Intelligence: Known for their global attention dataset, Amplified Intelligence excels in active and passive attention measurement, providing insights across platforms and formats.
• Lumen: Using eye-tracking technology, Lumen generates predictive models for digital, OOH, and cinema, offering creative optimization insights.
• TVision: A specialist in TV and CTV, TVision provides second-by-second analysis of attention within households, enabling precise creative evaluations.

While each partner brings distinct advantages, their collective contributions underscore the transformative power of attention measurement.

Attention as a Strategic Imperative

The shift toward attention metrics isn’t just a tactical upgrade; it’s a strategic necessity. Planning for attention forces brands to rethink their approach to media investment, creative development, and audience engagement. It enables advertisers to:

1. Prioritize High-Impact Media: Allocate budgets to platforms and placements proven to garner sustained attention.
2. Refine Creative Strategies: Identify and amplify creative elements that capture and maintain focus.
3. Validate Business Outcomes: Demonstrate a clear link between attention and incremental sales, enhancing accountability and ROI.

Charting the Path Forward

The road to widespread adoption of attention metrics is not without challenges. As attention measurement gains traction, it’s crucial to address industry-wide gaps in standardization and transparency. Additionally, buyers and planners must approach “attention proxies” with caution, ensuring that data integrity is not compromised by substandard methodologies.

At Do Loco, we remain committed to advancing attention as a key metric to optimize campaign performance by championing best practices and fostering collaboration with measurement partners, we aim to help brands navigate this transformative era in media.

The Loco take: THERE IS A PLACE FOR attention metrics

Attention is the currency of the modern advertising landscape. As media consumption habits continue to evolve, brands that prioritize attention measurement will be better positioned to cut through the noise and drive meaningful connections with their audiences. The stakes are high, but the rewards are even higher.

At Do Loco, we’re excited to be at the forefront of this movement, helping brands harness the power of attention to achieve their goals. Together, let’s redefine what success looks like in advertising.