Red Door Interactive's Reid Carr presents a pharmaceutical case study in which he used the web to measure performance for offline ads.

Although online advertising is just one of the elements in the media mix, it often seems to be the one that undergoes the majority of today's real-time testing. Sure, some marketers choose to test direct mail by producing a number of versions based on a control, and then see what findings the response rates produce; in fact, that is primarily how advertising testing began (that and with those tiny newspaper ads in the classified section). 

Today, however, one excellent data point being used to determine the success of offline advertising is whether or not the ad drove traffic to the website. So, how does a marketer do this?

Here is one example of a recent successful client campaign that Red Door Interactive developed:

SkinMedica, a leading pharmaceutical company, wanted to create an advertising push in a variety of media to test which channel would be best to drive awareness, and ultimately, obtain physician inquiries about their VANIQA product. One obstacle was that true conversions, a critical piece of the testing equation, are difficult to track on a short-term basis due to the private nature of pharmaceutical usage and reliance on third-party information.

Secondary research shows that consumers heavily research the product online (VANIQA is a facial hair remover for women that is targeted at a higher income demographic). Red Door, therefore, was comfortable with the assumption that the web was the best vehicle to use in determining the target consumers' engagement with the brand.

SkinMedica decided to test consumer beauty magazines, cable TV, local radio and pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising. Red Door also created and tested an information-specific website to assess product messaging. All of these vehicles ultimately drove traffic to the VANIQA-focused website. 

Measurable elements being tracked included reach, site traffic, single page accesses, email sign-ups, physician finder searches and doctor discussion guide downloads -- the latter three activities were considered conversions for the purposes of this test.

Red Door tracked the cost of each advertising type, as well as its success in getting the user to perform the desired activity in assessing where best to focus advertising dollars and drive traffic to optimize conversions.

Tracking of the online PPC campaign was performed by straightforward means, and so the focus of this column instead will be on what we did for the offline components. 

One of the key components in tracking the success of offline advertising was having a good web analytics package in place that gave Red Door the ability to segment traffic based on the geographic location of users. From there, Red Door set up tracking parameters around locations where commercials were broadcast, including the time and duration of each promotion as well as unique URLs for various landing pages associated with the campaign.

To provide a baseline, we examined control cities (that maintain similar qualities as the cities in which we were running cable and radio campaigns) for previous traffic levels and usage in addition to the campaign cities. Alongside using web analytics to track where visitors were coming from, viewers were encouraged to visit campaign-specific URLs on the TV commercials. 

Red Door worked with SkinMedica to develop offers that drove users to specific landing pages, designed to test the offer and the success of the shows (alongside which they aired) in drawing viewers. On the website, Red Door also asked users which shows got them to go online. The answer to this question was used to confirm that they were coming in off the show designed to take them to that specific URL, and also uncover other shows watched by this target audience, since users will often answer with other favorites if they don't remember which they were watching.

In testing radio, Red Door chose not to encourage listeners to go to unique landing page URLs, since we wanted to focus on the product's brand name (which happens to be the URL), and the medium lacks a visual cue, overall, making it difficult to introduce a cumbersome URL.

Finally, in testing magazines, responses last for a longer period of time than with other media, since people tend to hang on to magazines longer. Though Red Door and SkinMedica saw peaks and valleys consistent with the distribution dates, the surge on the landing URLs lasted longer.

The results

Clearly there are a number of variables in the series of tests that I've described. However, there are also several generalities that Red Door recognizes in most tests of this nature. The following results from the VANIQA campaign exemplify results that tend to occur overall.

• By using the segmentation tools available in our web analytics software, Red Door was able to identify how visitors from the various media used the websites. Not only were we able to learn how each medium converted and the volume of traffic each message drove, but we were also able to notice clear distinctions in their navigation paths.
• Web traffic provided greater single-page entries; so, many users visited the landing page and then exited the site. However, the total cost of each conversion was less than that of the other media.
• TV provided greater overall reach, traffic and conversions, with conversions in particular being quite high. We attribute this to the greater amount of effort a user exerts to go from TV to the web, in acting on his or her initial interest. Another interesting piece of data was that a high percentage of users visited the site without having typed in the additional landing page URL ("/tv"), but when they realized that the offer was exclusive to the show they were watching, they then typed in the extra few characters to reveal that special offer landing page.
• With radio, we witnessed a high level of single page entries and a low conversion rate; those findings fueled us to investigate the creative and messaging because we expected similar results as TV. The issue here may have been a lack of a compelling offer beyond the product benefits, which will be tweaked for future campaigns.

Because of the power of the web in helping consumers to research more information and retrieve special offers, it can also often be used to track the success of many offline campaigns. There are a number of great tools that marketers can leverage to help calculate advertising ROI to manage their media mix effectively. Each piece of the media mix has its distinct purpose and benefits in promoting a product. By using and measuring each appropriately, marketers can yield powerful results.

Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive, helping clients -- such as the San Diego Convention Center, SkinMedica, BeneTrac and Sharp Systems of America -- to lay out strategies for their online presence and interaction activities. Before founding Red Door Interactive, Carr formed the interactive arm for the San Diego-based PR agency, McQuerterGroup. Prior to that, he was chief operating officer and accounts director at PBJ Digital, a bi-coastal Interactive development and incubator shop in Los Angeles; before then, Carr handled account management in both the Venice and Playa del Rey offices of TBWA/Chiat/Day. He has a BA from the University of Oregon's advertising program.