MANILA, PHILIPPINES– Among the many areas impacted by the coronavirus are businesses’ media spends and strategies: Some 89 percent of advertisers say they have take action with their budgets in response to COVID-19; with 45 percent saying they have adjusted media type usage or shifted budget among media types.*
As business owners make changes to the services that they offer, many had to reconsider things such as what to do about marketing and how much to spend on ads.
Although it’s important to focus on what’s happening day to day, it’s also important for businesses to think through strategies with both the short and long term in mind.
For example, although many current consumer behaviours depart from the norm, such as spending more time on social media due to concerns around COVID-19, behavioural shifts may not extend past the current environment.
It’s not always easy to understand the effect that different decisions might have, so Facebook developed resources to help.
Below are four strategies for understanding advertising performance during this time:
- Simplify your strategy
Evaluating a measurement strategy to adapt to today’s conditions doesn’t mean that you need to abandon existing measurement approaches. Rather than changing course completely, consider simplifying your strategy to focus on using your organisation’s current key sources of truth. This allows you to understand shifts and make media optimisations more quickly.
- Use testing to optimize quickly
To gain a better understanding of today’s behaviours, consider running quick A/B and multi-cell tests. Through measurement and learning, you can assess the impact of making adjustments in areas such as audience targeting and creative presentation. This allows you to adapt your ads, undertake changes with greater confidence and optimise your strategy for the current environment.
- Re-evaluate tests designed to inform future decisions
With the profound changes that are happening to people’s day-to-day lives, media performance is often unusual. When looking at insights from tests conducted during this time, consider the extent to which current conditions are affecting results. Some findings and best practices may still be generalised and used to inform future business decisions, while others may only be applicable now.
- Consider impact by industry and marketing conditions
Different verticals and products are facing starkly different realities during this time, with some seeing increased demand and others seeing dramatic drops. Moreover, advertising conditions vary widely by geography and customer base. This means that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Ultimately, the right measurement strategy will have to be tailored to your specific goals, customers and marketing conditions.
Take a look at Adapting your ad measurement strategy for COVID-19 impact to learn more about each of these strategies and access a decision tree that can help you assess the effects of different measurement decisions. Learn more about what this means for marketers on Facebook IQ.
REFERENCES:
*Coronavirus Effect on Advertising Report, Advertiser Perceptions. Q12. In which of the followings ways has the Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak impacted your recent or ongoing advertising efforts?
