Measuring What They Did

Here are various metrics for measuring What They Did: the actions taken by members of your target audience, as opposed to What They Thought. The actions might include, for example:

1. asking for more information
2. subscribing to a periodical
3. purchasing a product
4. referring a friend or business associate
5. agreeing to be a reference account

They also might include the reduction or elimination of costly behavior such as:

1. accidents for which your company would have been liable
2. boycotts of your company's products

Unlike the measurement of mental states, the measurement of behaviors is evaluative – it can help you measure your profitability (return on investment). That is, it can tell you the value of the increased revenue or decreased costs, from which you can calculate the incremental gross profit and the ROI that resulted from your communications.

Tools for Measuring What They Did

In a related way, you can survey your customers and ask them how they decided to buy your brand (Reverse Tracking).

The accuracy of these tools is limited, because people often forget why they picked a brand, or they subconsciously suppress the knowledge that they were swayed by "PR," or other reasons.

In some cases, you can use Isolation to identify the cause of a purchase or other result. If, for example, you operate a small retail store, and you place an ad in the local newspaper announcing a special, one-day-only offer, you can later watch the "blip" in your sales and attribute it to that ad. Obviously, this works only in fairly simple situations.

By far, the most accurate way to measure how much your ad/PR program affected what people did is to perform Classical Tracking, which consists of building tracking mechanisms into your vehicles before the fact.

In your offline ad/PR, you put a code in every ad, coupon, response card, etc., so when a prospect buys, you know what he has responded to.

You can also use tracking to test one ad against another. Two long-established techniques for this are A-B Splits and Rotation.

In online marketing, available technology makes the tracking almost effortless.

With Classical Tracking, you know exactly what happened. You are not at the mercy of anyone's self-deception or faulty memory.

As you become able to prove that your program is profitable, be sure to defend your position against detractors, which are frequently found in the Sales department.

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