One of the biggest worries people have about TV is that they won’t know whether it worked. With online adverts you can see every click, and TV can feel like a leap of faith by comparison.
It’s far more measurable than that, even though you won’t get a report naming every person who watched and then bought. What you can do is build an honest picture from several sources, most of which are numbers you already collect. We make the adverts, so we’re hardly impartial about whether they work, which is why nearly everything here relies on your own figures and not on anything we tell you. There are two questions to answer: whether the advert was seen by the audience you were buying, and what it did for your business once they’d seen it.
Start by deciding what success looks like
This has to come first, because you can’t measure a result you haven’t defined. It’s why one of the first things we ask any new client is what outcome they want, whether that’s more visits to the website, more phone calls or more people through the door. The answer shapes the advert itself, and it also tells you which one or two numbers to watch.
Once you know what you’re looking for, make a note of where things stand before the campaign starts, so you’ve got something to compare against. A few ordinary weeks is the minimum, and the same period last year is better still, because most businesses have a season, and a rise that happens every spring can’t be credited to an advert. Keep a record, too, of anything else that changes while you’re on air, such as a price rise, a new search campaign or a competitor’s sale, so that you know what else might have moved the numbers.
Was it seen by the people you paid to reach?
With that settled, the first of the two questions is the easier one, and your media buyer answers it for you. Television viewing in the UK is measured by Barb, which tracks what a panel of 7,000 households are watching, and its figures are what the whole industry uses to work out how many people saw each ad break.
At the end of a campaign, your media buyer can give you a report listing every time your advert was shown, with the channel, the programme and the size of the audience it reached. Set against the original plan, that tells you whether you got the airtime you paid for, including how much of your chosen audience saw the advert at least once and how many times, on average, they saw it. Those two measures are called reach and frequency, and we’ve explained them in what are TVRs? What the report can’t tell you is whether anybody did anything as a result, so the rest of the picture has to come from your own figures.
Watch your website alongside the times your advert was shown
For most businesses the first of those figures is the website, because the easiest thing for a viewer to do is to look you up on the phone that’s already in their hand. If you lay the times your advert was shown alongside your website figures, you’ll often see visits lift within a few minutes of each showing and then settle back again. Matching the two, showing by showing, is what allows a media buyer to see which channels and times of day are pulling their weight, and to move the money towards them as the campaign goes on.
How clear that lift is depends partly on how the airtime was bought. The spikes are at their sharpest on traditional broadcast TV, where everybody watching the channel sees your advert at the same moment and a share of them reach for their phones together. A growing part of most campaigns doesn’t work like that. With AdSmart from Sky, ITVX and Channel 4’s streaming service, the advert is delivered to each household whenever that household happens to be watching, so the same audience is reached across hours and days instead of all at once. The response arrives the same way, as a gradual rise over the weeks you’re on air with no single moment you could point to. That doesn’t mean it’s working any less well, only that you’d judge it by the overall level of visits during the campaign, and not by looking for a jump at a particular time.
The kind of advert you’re running matters as well. One that asks people to go online straight away can produce spikes you couldn’t miss if you tried, while one that’s there to build your name produces something smaller and slower, so a flat line in that case isn’t evidence that the advert has failed. We’ve set out the difference between the two in brand building or getting a response.
The slower signal to watch is the number of people searching for your business by name, which tends to grow over the weeks of a campaign as more people become aware of you. Your analytics won’t label any of this as television, though. Somebody who sees the advert and types your name into Google is recorded as a search visitor, and if they click the paid listing at the top of the page, your search campaign takes the credit (and sends you the bill). So if visits from people searching for your name, or typing your address in directly, rise during the weeks you’re on air, that is very often TV arriving under a different heading.
Give TV its own way in
If you want firmer evidence of where enquiries are coming from, you can give people who’ve seen the advert a route that isn’t used anywhere else. That could be a web address that only appears in the advert, a phone number of its own, an offer code, or a QR code on screen. Anything that arrives that way can only have come from TV, which makes it the most direct proof you’ll get.
Its weakness is that it only counts the people who use it, and plenty won’t. Viewers remember a name far better than a special web address, so many of them will search for you an hour later, or the following weekend, and turn up in your figures looking like anybody else. Read a dedicated number or address as the minimum that TV brought in, the part you can prove, and assume the true figure is higher.
Ask your customers, and read the answers with care
The other way of finding out where somebody came from is to ask them. “Where did you hear about us?” is the oldest method there is, and it’s still worth doing, both on your enquiry form and by whoever answers the phone. The answers need a little care, because people are not reliable witnesses to their own decisions. Somebody who saw your advert three times and then searched for you will usually say “Google”, since that was the last thing they did, and the advert that put your name in their head goes unmentioned.
That makes the answers more useful as a trend than as a count. If you ask the same question in the same way from before the campaign starts, and the share of people mentioning TV grows while you’re on air, that tells you something real.
Compare your sales, and compare regions if you can
All of these are signs along the way, and the measure that matters most is the one in your own books. Compare your enquiries, sales or visitors during the campaign with the same period the year before, and with the weeks leading up to it. On its own, that always leaves some room for argument, because a good month might be down to the advert or might be down to the weather.
The most convincing answer comes from having somewhere the advert wasn’t shown. TV can be bought by region, and these days by postcode as well, so a business that trades in more than one area can advertise in one and hold another back for comparison. Take a carpet retailer with stores in Leeds and Newcastle that advertises only in the North East for a couple of months. If the two stores normally rise and fall together, and Newcastle’s sales pull clearly ahead while Leeds carries on as before, there’s very little else that could explain it, because the season, the economy and the prices were the same in both places. It’s the nearest thing to a controlled experiment that most businesses can run, and it’s a good argument for starting with one region before you commit to more.
Give it time
Whichever of these you use, try not to close the books too early, because some of the effect is immediate but a lot of it builds. People who see your advert today might not need what you sell for another six months, and when they do, you’re the name they already know.
There’s research to support being patient, in the form of a 2024 study called Profit Ability 2. It was commissioned by Thinkbox (the marketing body for commercial TV, so not a neutral party), it pooled the results of advertising by 141 brands, and it found that 58% of the profit that advertising generated arrived after the first 13 weeks. That figure covers every kind of advertising in the study and not TV alone, so it’s a fair warning against judging any campaign by the week it went out, and a good reason to keep measuring after yours has finished.
What it looks like when it works
Two campaigns we’ve worked on show how different the right measure can be from one business to the next. When Bradford College ran their campaign, views of the college’s clearing webpage rose by 474.5% compared with 2017/2018, and they went on to exceed their recruitment targets. The Bed Experts measured theirs at the till, where the campaign helped them to break their previous sales records. Both of those are results the client could see in their own numbers, which is exactly what you want.
Build it in from the start
Measurement works best when it’s planned before the advert is made, because it can affect what goes on screen, such as which web address or phone number you show, and it can affect where the campaign runs if you’d like a region to compare against. If you’re thinking about TV, ask us for a free storyboard and we’ll talk through what you want to achieve and how you’d know you’d achieved it.
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