Sheri Klein
As a Research Director, Sheri Klein is responsible for advising the planning and research process for the Ad Council’s public service campaigns. She is also responsible for evaluating campaign effectiveness and conducing cross-campaign analyses for the organization. A sociologist in training (and at heart), Sheri has been involved in social research for over 10 years and plans to chronicle research trends and best practices within the social marketing world.
Posts by Sheri
The Power of Suggestion
A few years ago a friend told me that whenever there is silence in a room, 50% of the people in that room are thinking about Abraham Lincoln. While the validity of this fact has yet to be proven, it has absolutely changed my life. Now, regardless of whether or not I want to, I think about Lincoln whenever a room falls silent.
As social marketers, we rely on the power of suggestion to help raise awareness, change attitudes and shift behaviors to better people’s lives. And yet by doing this, there is always the potential to highlight an issue, attitude or behavior in a way that negatively influences social norms. There are a number of studies and articles that discuss the negative influence of advertising on social norms. For instance, one study found that teens with higher exposure to anti-drug PSAs (between 1999-2004) were more likely to believe their peers used marijuana regularly (Westat, 2006). Another alarming example from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention suggests that specific representations and references of suicide in the media actually increase suicide rates.
While these sorts of influences are often difficult to identify when developing a social advertising or marketing campaign it is important that we remain mindful of the power of suggestion working to our disadvantage.
Filed under: Communications, Media
Key Drivers of Website Traffic
In the past, I have taken a pretty hard stance on the idea that norms and averages across social advertising campaigns should not be used when trying to establish goals and measures of success. The chart below, which illustrates website visitor data for 43 Ad Council campaigns, supports this notion. It is clear that there is no normative pattern in website sessions among our various campaigns; therefore, providing an average to help establish a goal for website visitors would be setting ourselves up for failure. Ultimately, by using an average we would over or under-estimate a campaign’s true potential to garner visitors.
So, in order to understand what drives website traffic to our social advertising campaign websites, the Ad Council worked with Robinson and Muenster Associates (RMA) to conduct a cross-campaign regression analysis. Here are some the key findings that can help provide context to our campaigns when establishing goals and evaluating success:
- When your target audience is broad (e.g. adults 18+), it results in more web sessions per month
- When a sponsoring organization is publically well known, it results in more web sessions per month
- When a micro-site or “vanity URL” is created specifically for a social marketing campaign (rather than driving to an existing website), it results in fewer web sessions per month
- When a URL name is difficult to remember, it results in fewer web sessions per month
- When the social issue you are advertising appears in Google Search’s top 5 listings, it results in more web sessions per month
- Increased support/placement in Google’s AdWords results in more web sessions per month
- When a you are more active in promoting the social issue (through several outlets and partnerships), it results in more web sessions per month
Filed under: Research and Evaluation
Tags: Campaigns, Research, Website Traffic
Unfair to Compare: Considerations for Setting Goals and Evaluating Social Marketing Campaigns
Creating goals and evaluating the success of our social marketing campaigns tends to elicit the same types of questions:
- What can we expect from this campaign?
- How do these results measure up to other campaigns?
While these types of questions help provide context (in setting expectations and evaluating whether or not a campaign did well), they force us to group and compare campaigns that often have very different objectives.
So, is it really fair to average or compare results from campaigns? In other words, can we really compare a campaign that asks people to participate in a 3-day walk to cure breast cancer with one that encourages adults to adopt a pet?
You would think that if you had enough social advertising campaigns you could eventually calculate some averages (e.g. ad recognition or web visits) that might help you understand how your campaign is doing. But, even with data from the Ad Council’s 53 campaigns, there are still too many factors that contribute to the success or failure of a campaign. Among them, consider the following:
- Target audience type (e.g. General Market, Hispanic, African American, Teens, Kids, etc.)
- Length of campaign
- Whether or not you message/social issue is a hot topic in the news
- Call-to-action type (e.g. self-contained message in an advertisement vs. need to learn more by calling or visiting a website)
- Perceived difficulty of your call-to-action (e.g. Adopt a teen from foster care vs. Talking to your kids about underage drinking)
- Type and amount of media distributions
- Level of media support (online and traditional)
- Fulfillment type (Hotline vs. Web)
- The public’s familiarity with your organization
- Type and amount of online activities used to promote the campaign
As these factors represent a drop in the bucket of all the things we should consider when establishing goals and evaluating a campaign, my recommendation is to avoid the comparisons. Instead, we need to invest in the time and resources to establish best practices and share them (across industry) so that each of us can shape stronger social advertising campaigns.
Filed under: Research and Evaluation
Tags: Campaigns, changing behavior, ROI
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