You’re planning a marketing campaign.
You’ve got ideas bouncing around, maybe a catchy slogan, or a sleek design. But are you sure it’ll work? Or are you just going to press publish and hope for the best?
Hope is not a strategy. You need data. Then you’ll know exactly what resonates with your audience, and more importantly, what drives them to take action.
More engagement, more conversions, more loyal customers. And all of it is grounded in consumer insights, not wishful thinking.
Let’s show you how to get there in our guide to campaign planning.
What is pre-post campaign tracking?
Pre-post campaign trackers are multi-wave research studies designed to measure brand metrics before and after a campaign or event.
By comparing these two sets of data, you can see exactly how much your campaign moved the needle.
They can be standalone surveys or part of an ongoing brand tracker, focusing on timing and consistent questioning.
Pro tip 💡
If you integrate your campaign tracking into your existing brand tracker, make sure the audiences are the same for both.”
“For example, if your regular brand tracker consists of all consumers in your region, but your campaign targets only Millennials on the East Coast, these two studies should be separate. If your campaign targeted all consumers in your region, then go crazy and add it to your regular brand tracker!
Why is it important to track pre and post-campaign performance?
Tracking your campaign before and after launch helps you understand the story your campaign is telling through data.
Pre-campaign metrics give you a baseline, while post-campaign metrics show you the results of your hard work.
Together, they give you a clear picture of your campaign’s effectiveness and help you justify your marketing spend.
Setting objectives for your campaigns
A successful campaign always starts with clear objectives. These objectives give you a tangible way to measure your success.
What your objectives are depends on your business and commercial goals. You might want to build brand awareness – reach, impressions, eyeballs are what matter here.
Maybe you want to drive sales – conversion here is what matters in that case.
This is when you should think about SMART goals.
How to set SMART goals for marketing campaigns
Set SMART goals to keep your campaign focused and on target.
SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound – are the basic blueprint for a campaign that helps you stay on track, performs well, and delivers results.
Pro tip 💡
Align your research questions and KPIs with your campaign objectives from the start. This will make it easier to track your progress and adjust as needed.
The four types of campaign objectives
Generally all marketing campaigns will fit into one of these categories:
Awareness: Get your brand noticed.
Engagement: Promote interaction and build relationships.
Conversion: Turn interest into action.
Retention: Keep your customers coming back.
Step-by-step guide to using insights for your campaigns
Gathering insights is just the beginning. The real magic happens when you apply those insights to create campaigns that resonate. Here’s how to turn data into action.
How can you effectively use consumer insights to tailor your marketing messages?
- Set clear objectives: Know what you want to achieve before you start. Whether it’s improving brand awareness, driving conversions, or increasing customer retention, your objectives will guide how you gather and use insights.
- Gather and analyze data: Use a mix of surveys, interviews, and CRM data to collect the insights you need. Then, dig into that data to identify trends, patterns, and key takeaways that will inform your strategy.
- Create targeted campaigns: With a deep understanding of your audience, you can craft messages that speak directly to their needs, desires, and pain points.
- Select the right channels: It’s not enough to have the right message—you also need to deliver it in the right place. Use your insights to figure out where your audience spends their time, whether that’s on social media, through email, or via another platform.
- Monitor and adjust: Launching a campaign isn’t the end—it’s only the beginning. Keep a close eye on how your campaign is performing, and be ready to pivot based on the data you’re collecting in real-time.
Pro tip 💡
Campaign insights aren’t static. Make it a habit to update your insights regularly, so your campaigns always reflect the latest information about your audience and the market.
How to set up your campaign tracker
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.
How to run a pre-post campaign survey
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.
Pro tip 💡
Running a mid-campaign wave can also be super useful! This can give you another metric to tell you how things are going, in addition to your channels’ engagement and conversion metrics.
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.
What campaign tracking metrics should you measure?
Your campaign objectives should dictate the metrics you track. Here are some key metrics to consider:
- Brand awareness: Measure unaided and aided recall to see how well your campaign increased brand visibility. These questions can be similar or the same as the brand recall questions you use in your brand tracker.
- Purchase intent: Assess the likelihood that your audience will purchase your product or service after seeing your campaign.
- Brand perception and association: Track shifts in brand attributes and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge how your campaign influenced customer perceptions. Asking more qualitative questions about how people perceive your brand here can also be a super useful way to figure out if your campaign impacted overall perception.
- Ad recall: Evaluate how well your target audience remembers your ads and their messages. You can use this insight to inform future campaign messaging, placement etc.
- Engagement: Analyze social media interactions, website visits, and time spent on site to understand how your audience is engaging with your campaign.
Pro tip 💡
The key aspect for questions is keeping the brand metric questions consistent across the two or more waves of the tracker and ensuring they are shown to respondents in the same order both times. Consistency is key!
How to choose the right audience for a pre-post campaign survey
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.
Pro tip 💡
Set quotas to make sure you get a reliable spread of consumers across your target group.
Selecting and screening your audience
The accuracy of your survey results depends on how well your sample represents your target audience. Here’s how to get it right:
How can screening questions improve the accuracy of your research?
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.
Why is setting quotas important in campaign research?
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.
Pro tip 💡
Consider oversampling smaller but important audience segments to make sure their perspectives are adequately captured in your analysis.
Campaign tracking audience checklist
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!
What’s the ideal campaign tracking sample size?
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:
- The feasibility of your audience – this is how likely you are to get a good amount of responses from your target audience. If you’re running a super niche campaign – let’s say, men between 45 and 47 who go fishing on Wednesdays – you might struggle to get 385 of these people to respond. If your campaign’s targeted more broadly, you can get away with a bigger sample size.
- The geography of your campaign – similar to the men who fish, if your campaign’s target geo was small and specific, you might struggle to get a sizeable response rate so a smaller sample size will be better. For a nationwide campaign, or one covering a large area, 385+ should be perfectly feasible.
Pro tip 💡
It’s worth bearing in mind the standard statistical rules around margin of error when comparing two self-reported awareness scores, for example, on a base size of 100 the margin of error is 10%, i.e. any reported score could be anywhere between 10% points above or below the reported score.”
“However, for a sample of 500, the margin of error shrinks to just 4%. This means the results you have are more likely to be accurate.
Analyzing your campaign tracker
Your research results are only as good as the action you take from it.
Once you’ve gathered your campaign tracking data, it’s time to analyze it and translate those insights into actionable strategies.
Campaign tracking analysis best practices
Bear these approaches in mind when you’re digging into your campaign tracking results:
- Holistic analysis: Don’t just focus on topline metrics – drop down into subgroups and specific KPIs to get a full picture of your campaign’s performance.
- Use additional data sources: Complement survey data with sales figures, website analytics, and social media insights to get a comprehensive understanding of your campaign’s impact.
How do you turn insights from campaign data into action?
Identify what worked well in your campaign and areas for improvement. Use these insights to refine future campaigns, optimise your marketing spend, and increase customer engagement.
When looking back at your campaign, bear these questions in mind:
- How have metrics for your brand changed relative to other brands? (Remember to add competitor brand questions to your brand tracker!)
- Which sub-groups were more likely to have seen the advert?
- Have there been any changes to brand association and perception, beyond just awareness and consideration?
- And if there are any decreases in metrics, are they statistically significant?
When all of these elements are considered, a fuller story about what impact your campaign has had will start to emerge.
Is there such a thing as a ‘bad’ result?
After reviewing your pre- and post-campaign tracker, you might be disappointed with the results. But from a research perspective, there’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ result.
If the results don’t meet expectations, that doesn’t mean the research wasn’t worthwhile. In fact, these situations often provide the most valuable insights. Where did the campaign fall short? How was the creative perceived? What can you learn for next time?
Trackers that reveal these lessons are often the most useful. They might even guide future creative testing for your next campaign.
Campaign evaluation survey questions
Here are some example questions you can use in your campaign evaluation surveys.
Questions like these will give you a good understanding of your pre-post campaign performance so you can properly attribute impact to your marketing campaigns.
Pro tip 💡
You might hear campaign evaluation research referred to as pre-post campaign research.
As the name suggests, you should run these surveys before and after your campaign’s live dates.
BUT it’s also super useful to run a wave DURING your campaign – this will give you a great additional measurement for how your campaign is performing.
Qualifying the right respondents
First you’ll want to qualify in the right target customers with a question like this, inconspicuously listing your product among some other products:
- Which of the following, if any, have you purchased in the past 12 months?
- [Your product]
- Soap
- Clothes
- Shoes
- Bottled water
- Books
Prompted and unprompted brand recall
You’ll then want to ask a couple of brand awareness questions. These are crucial for campaign evaluation – running this before, after (and sometimes during) your campaign should signal any uplift in your prompted and unprompted brand awareness.
- Thinking about [your category], what brands, if any are you aware of?
- [Open text field for respondents to type the brands they recall]
- Which of these [your category] brands, if any, are you aware of?
- [Your brand]
- Competitor 1
- Competitor 2
- Competitor 3
- Competitor 4
- etc.
Purchase question
After that it’s good to ask a couple of questions about how likely it is for your target audience to buy from you and competitors’ brands.
- Which of these [your category] brands, if any, have you ever purchased?
- [Your brand]
- Competitor 1
- Competitor 2
- Competitor 3
- Competitor 4
- etc.
- Which of these brands, if any, would you consider purchasing from in the next 12 months?
- [Your brand]
- Competitor 1
- Competitor 2
- Competitor 3
- Competitor 4
- etc.
☝️ If you ask this question before, during and soon after a campaign, you’ll get an understanding of whether your campaign has increased purchase intent. It’s important to remember that this intent might decrease after your campaign, because your brand won’t be as top-of-mind for them.
Campaign feedback
You can ask some questions specifically about your campaign.
This will help you get an even better understanding of how your campaign landed – and you can use this intel to inform your future campaigns.
- Which of the following brands have you seen or heard advertising for in the pas [X] weeks?
- [Your brand]
- Competitor 1
- Competitor 2
- Competitor 3
- Competitor 4
- etc.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
You probably know all about the NPS score – here’s a little refresher if not.
It’s a good shout to ask this NPS question in your campaign evaluation as it gives you another super useful metric. And if you track your NPS at other points in the customer journey, it gives you a solid comparison in the context of your campaign evaluation.
- How likely would you be to recommend [Your brand] to a friend, family member or colleague?
- [Scale from 0-10]
How top brands track their campaigns
The most successful consumer brands know how important it is to measure their campaign performance, and apply it to future campaigns, marketing and product development.
Here’s how some top brands have used campaign tracking with Attest.
