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Once your marketing campaign is out in the wild, the next phase begins: measuring its performance, and optimizing to drive ROI.
It’s not enough to set it and forget it – you need to understand what’s working, what’s not, and why.
This is where pre-post campaign tracking comes into play.
A well-structured pre-post campaign gives you insights into your campaign’s performance, helping you determine what worked, what didn’t, and why.
For your pre-post campaign research to give you anything useful, you should run at least 2 waves – covering the pre-campaign period, and the post-campaign period.
After your 2 main waves, it can also be useful to run a follow-up wave a few weeks or months after the campaign. With this you can see if the results you saw during or straight after the campaign have been maintained. This post-post wave is particularly useful for expensive or really important campaigns.
Your campaign objectives should dictate the metrics you track. Here are some key metrics to consider:
Generally the ‘ideal audience’ will either reflect the target audience for the campaign, or it will reflect the audience that could be exposed to the campaign. In many cases the ideal audience may revolve around a combination of both these ideas.
Including a control group – people outside your target group or who weren’t exposed to the campaign – can help you figure out if the campaign worked better for your target audience, or potentially better for a completely different audience.
The accuracy of your survey results depends on how well your sample represents your target audience. Here’s how to get it right:
Screening questions filter out participants who don’t meet your criteria, ensuring that only relevant and qualified respondents are included in your survey. This increases the reliability of your data and the validity of your conclusions.
Setting quotas helps you establish that your sample is representative of the population you’re studying. This is especially important when your audience is diverse, and you need to capture perspectives from all key segments.
There are a bunch of factors that will go into your decision about campaign tracking audiences, but it’s worth asking yourself the following questions:
✅ Is my survey audience relevant to my strategic aims?
✅ Is my survey audience credibly able to see the campaign?
✅ Is my study feasible? I.e can I find enough of these people to take part?
✅ Do you want to go broad, beyond your core target audience, or keep it laser focused?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll be in a much better position to set your audience for the pre and post tracking!
Generally, we’d advise a base size of at least 385 for a single survey of a tracker, and potentially larger depending on who you’re speaking to and if you’re running the research in a larger market such as the United States.
Your specific sample size will depend on a couple of things:
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