By Sharat Khurana, Director, Finance & Corporate Communication, mKhoj

Accuracy of an advertising campaign has different measuring parameters. In a generic sense we could define it based on three parameters. Each advertisement has its own set of audience preferences and the first step of accuracy calculation could be based on the advertisement reaching a qualified audience. Secondly, the content of the advertisement itself is important and should catch the interest of the viewers. And finally the desirable action after watching the advertisement, whether it is brand awareness or a more tangible action like a purchase of a commodity, helps calibrate the accuracy of a campaign.

If we look at traditional media like television or newspaper, the calculation of the success of the campaign is ambiguous and inaccurate. For e.g. if an advertisement is broadcast on TV it would be very hard to assess the audience watching the advertisement. The show could be watched by people from different economic status having very different tastes of purchase. Hence it would be next to impossible to judge the success of the advertisement campaign depending on how contextually relevant the ad is to its viewers. If we try measuring the success by the 2nd and 3rd parameter we again face a road block. There is no way of knowing if the viewer is still watching the advertisements with the same interest as the show during which the advertisement was played. People tend to drop interests during the commercial breaks and in most cases, run around to complete small tasks around the house while the commercials are being played. Even in newspapers, it is practically impossible to tell if the ads have actually been viewed and if it captured the interest of its reader. We measure parameters like increase in sales to assess the success of the campaign, but fail to further dissect the success and map it to either the media mix or due to some external factors like word-of-mouth.

Mobile advertising on the other hand, can give insights about the campaign that is accurate to the dot. If we consider the target audience, the ad can be served to users depending upon the country, operator, handset, economic status, age and so on. The targeting capability is very high with a mobile device due to the fact that each person owns her/his own phone imprinting the mobile usage with her/his own signature. Unlike the television or newspaper examples mentioned above, mobile advertising can tell if a user has clicked an ad or not. This provides high measurability of the success of the advertisement. In fact this media can even report if particular actions were performed like a certain amount of time spent on the landing page of the advertisement, completion of a registration process, view of different pages etc. This not only can tell us if the advertisement has been viewed, it also tells us if a certain action has been taken to show that the ad had a value to its user. Typically advertisers would look for qualified visits of their ads so as to have a low cost per acquisition. Evidently, this medium provides transparent analytics at real time which helps advertisers assess the success of the campaign and change it accordingly.