Measuring the High Consideration Customer

Summary

Is there a better way to measure the digital behavior of consumers considering a complex or expensive purchase and improve outcomes going forward? At the ARF’s 2018 AUDIENCExSCIENCE conference, measurement company Arrivalist shared techniques they have used successfully, illustrating their work with six case studies. Because high consideration consumers are about to buy a big-ticket and/or complex product or service and ingest a lot of media over a long period, special techniques were employed to measure them. Arrivalist’s approach has application for both considered and impulse purchase brands:

• Location data obtained via device tracking and attribution (to confirm that the ad has been seen) were combined in a new way to inform marketing to the high consideration consumer.
• Arrivalist used “full cycle measurement” continuously throughout and adjacent to the campaign (before, during, after) to receive a full data set and avoid looking at isolated information. This included media delivery data, as well as the entire marketing campaign's results.

Arrivalist noted implications from their work:
• Marketers should consider longer attribution windows, measure more impressions and more media, and assess the incremental value of each element in an unbiased way in order to ensure a holistic return on investment.
• As part of this, marketers need to analyze the impact of site visits, paid social and paid search, keeping in mind that CTR has little correlation with results.
• Different creative themes produced vastly different response rates. More authentic messaging generated the best results.