If you are an advertiser looking to use TV to drive traffic to your web site or increase brand term searches, you can do a lot worse than employ some well tested techniques from the world of DRTV advertising to improve your results. In this short think-piece, I am going to review some of the techniques that can be borrowed from DRTV media planning to increase site visits from your DRTV media spend.

Before we go into techniques, it’s important to recognise that measurement is key to the response planning process. Many believe TV is not accountable, but in fact, audience delivery is measured on a minute by minute basis across the day. The BARB audience measurement panel allows us measure the audience size and composition for any spot on almost any channel at any time of day. This is minute by minute data which is ideal for matching to your second source of planning data; your own web traffic logs.

Using a combination of these two data sources enables advertisers to track web traffic, leads and sales back to their point of TV origin. So for example, we may be able to conclude that sales for product X with a value exceeding £50 are most likely to be gained from a given channel at a given time of day on a given day of week (which was traded at a given cost).

It is also possible to undertake other tests by developing a text matrix and deploying it over a given time period.  For example an advertiser can run a creative effectiveness test by running creative 1 over week 1 and creative 2 over week 4 (leaving a gap of two weeks to eradicate lag from the first campaign). From a test like this it may be possible to conclude that creative treatment 1 is more effective at driving online sales than creative treatment 2.

What do the results look like?

If you imagine that weekdays are twice as cost effective as weekends, and Channel 2 is twice as effective as other channels, and that creative 1 is three times as effective as creative 2, then you are already into the type of performance multipliers that can make the difference between an average campaign and a very strong ROI performance.

Let’s now look at this in currency terms. Let’s assume that an advertiser is experiencing a TV to Web cost per sale for a financial services product of £500 across broadcast media. Our day of week selection could reduce that to £250, our channel selection could reduce it to £125 and our creative selection could reduce it to £62.50.  This means the difference between a TV generated web sale costing £500 and a TV generated web sale costing £62.50.  These are the differences between making a sale at a significant potential profit and making a sale at a loss.