“Purchase-Driven Planning” Boosts ROI

Summary

NCS (Nielsen Catalina Solutions) created a new planning paradigm, “Purchase-Driven Planning.” The goal: put incremental sales at the center of advertisers’ goals by using a new approach via the NCS Purchase-Driven Planning Toolbox to offer a better way to plan and compare alternatives before running a campaign, supply a new way to understand what drives ROI, and isolate the sales impact of the creative response from the media delivery. The study looked at two key metrics for two radio brands.

The author sought to answer these questions at the planning stage.

• What happens if I change my creative strategy?
• Which buyer segments drive the highest sales?
• Does higher reach payout in ROI?
• How should I flight my impressions?

The finding was that the NCS Purchase-Driven Planning Toolbox could be used to test alternative media strategies and estimate the Incremental Sales each alternative can deliver.

At the post-buy stage, the author explored these questions:

• I have a low ROI – Why? Was it due to poor media tactics or poor creative or both?
• Which buyer segments drove the highest sales? In other words, what target should I use, and how broad or narrow should the target be?

In this instance, the use of the NCS Purchase Driven Planning Toolbox was used to separate the ROI value of the creative from the ROI value of the media tactics.

The presentation showed two metrics of success for two radio brands

For the first brand, the metric used was Coverage of Purchases, which provides the percent of category purchase events for which purchasers were exposed to an ad, in this case within 7 days before purchases. The finding: purchase coverage increased among light, medium, and heavy buyers with a +6.4% lift overall.

The second brand was assessed using Sales Lift per Exposed Category Purchases, which provides the impact in dollars and cents that the creative has on each exposed purchase event. Here, an overall increase of $2.82 occurred.

The author plans more studies going forward, looking at:

• Cross-Media: Working towards applying this to a cross-media campaign
• Beyond CPG _ Working with NBI to apply these concepts to credit card data
• Other Media: Print and Mobile