How to Conduct A Post Advertising Test

How do you know if your ad is effective?

Most brand managers would say "it's effective if there's a high recall of the brand". Your head of sales would probably say "an increase in sales would be a good determinant of an ad's success". Your inventory manager would most likely attribute it to the number of times the stocks were replenished.

But if you ask a market research manager, most likely he/she would not just give you a yes or no answer but would provide you statistical data on which part the ad failed and would also provide the brand manager a set of recommendations to address what is lacking in the ad.

Market researchers usually conduct post ad tests to determine brand recall and ad effectiveness. The general objective for conducting this type of test is to show how the ad stands out from competition and if there's enough brand recall that would help  convert a consumer to a customer. Basically, this type of test would answer the question "Does my Ad has what it takes to cut through the clutter?"

The test is pretty simple, just follow these steps:

1. Determine the target market
2. Using statistics, determine a sampling size that would represent the entire population of your target market
3. Survey is one-on-one - meaning, hire someone who can converse very well and is nonthreatening because it takes a good interviewer to get high quality answers from random consumers. 
4. Interviewer MUST follow what is in the questionnaire. Do not create your own questions. 
5. Write all the answers. And when I say all, I mean ALL. Even the smallest detail. 
6. After interviewing, gather all the results and tabulate in one file. (I'll create a separate post on how to tabulate the results).
7. After computing the results, compare the quantitative data to the qualitative and formulate your recommendations.

Sounds easy huh?

The hard part here is the interview part where you have to convince random strangers to spent some of their time talking to you and sharing information that can be personal depending on the brand being surveyed on.


So for those of you who are planning to conduct the research yourself, here are a few tips from yours truly:

• Be approachable and friendly! If you're a bitch in the real world, then this is not the job for you. But if you NEED to do this like it's a requirement for a class, then by all means TRY and do a bit of acting to get the data you need.
• Make sure NOT to add or remove anything from the questionnaire. Doing so will definitely not give you the right results you need. 
• Be polite - this is a no brainer, since you're the one who is in need of the data then you must be on people's good graces to get what you want. Makes sense right?
• Always say THANK YOU after the interview. After all, the answers of a random stranger might give you the insights you need to improve your company's ad. 

Also, I'm attaching the questionnaire that is needed for the interview. The questionnaire below is the same one I used when I was researching for a brand in the dressed-chicken category (the ones that you see in the supermarket). Just change the section where it talks about the brand with your own brand. I hope this helps and I promise to create another post on how to interpret the results.

Post Ad-Test-Questionnaire

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 Nicco Joselito Lopez-Tan is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at the De La Salle Univeristy - Taft Manila, taking up Master of Marketing Communications.