• Team contentFX

How do we measure branded content?

Updated: Jan 10, 2020

Unlike advertising that often reaches a large population, branded content more often has a smaller, more targeted audience. This makes branded content challenging to measure “in the wild”, as it is difficult to find people within the broader population who have been exposed to the content.

The way we get around this issue in contentFX is to use a controlled experiment. As IAB Research Director in Australia, Natalie Stanbury, told Marketing Magazine, “controlled experiments offer the perfect opportunity to adopt best practice scientific methods to add confidence and precision to marketing investment decisions”.

But how do controlled experiments work? The IAB UK created a measurement toolkit that outlines different ad testing methodologies. In the document, they outline the controlled experiments:

Controlled experiments randomly assign a group of people to a test or control group to observe and quantify the impact of a change in media over a defined period of time. The test group is exposed to a change in media (e.g. your new display advert) whilst the control group sees no change (ideally users are shown a ‘ghost’ ad which presents a relevant competitive baseline ad).

In contentFX, we apply the same approach – with some people being exposed to branded content, and compared to a control sample. We then get these same people to answer questions via an online survey and compare the results between the different groups, enabling us to understand the impact of the content.

In our next post, we look to understand what metrics are important when measuring engagement.