Advertising research can help guide smarter strategies – before, during, and after ads run. It's the practice of using data and insights to plan, track, and optimize advertising campaigns.

How does advertising benefit from research? Well, in an era where digital ad spend keeps rising, but budgets are tight, advertisers need to get as much value as they can from every campaign.

This isn't easy, but doing some advertising research can help improve the returns on your marketing efforts.

In fact, a research-driven approach can dramatically boost ad effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). It's all about understanding your audience's needs, monitoring real-time performance, and learning from each campaign.

This guide looks at the key elements of the advertising research process and discusses how you can overhaul your marketing strategies for better advertising effectiveness.

We’ll also highlight how Brandwatch tools like Measure and Advertise can help make the job a whole lot easier.

What is advertising research?

Advertising research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information related to advertising efforts. It involves testing creative ideas, identifying the best media channels, measuring campaign impact, and understanding how target consumers respond. 

It's quite different from general market research (which examines broader market and consumer trends), though the two can complement each other. 

The ultimate goal is to use evidence and insights to make informed decisions about your advertising strategy rather than relying on guesswork.

Generally, advertising research requires software to collect appropriate data and thoroughly monitor ads. This is where a platform like Brandwatch can help, with a suite of tools at your disposal to launch, track, measure, and understand ad campaigns.

Why the advertising research process matters

Consumers’ behaviors and tastes are constantly evolving, and new market trends emerge all the time. Social media advertising, for example, is a completely different beast from what it was 15 years ago. Without research and monitoring, ads risk missing the mark or blending into the noise. 

Moreover, competition for audience attention is fierce – especially on digital platforms, with more brands than ever investing in ads. 

Thorough advertising research gives you a competitive edge by revealing what messaging will cut through the noise, which channels will reach your audience, and where to put your budget for maximum impact.

Key elements of effective advertising research

Successful advertising research spans the entire campaign lifecycle – from ideation to reporting. Below are the key elements and stages where data and insights drive better ad performance.

Every great campaign starts with knowing your target audience and the market landscape. 

Before launching ads, marketers should research their ideal customers, what they care about, and how they talk about the relevant topics. This can involve analyzing demographic data, customer surveys, industry reports, and social media conversations. 

Modern consumer intelligence tools like Brandwatch Consumer Research make this easier by spotting online trends and consumer sentiments around your product or industry in real-time.

With social listening, you can learn what pain points or desires your audience has and even spot seasonal or emerging trends to tap into.

Competitor research is also valuable at this stage. Start by looking at what your competitors are doing in their ads and how audiences are responding. This helps identify gaps or opportunities. 

2. Ad concept testing and experimentation

Before rolling out a full campaign, testing your advertising concepts on a smaller scale is wise.

For traditional campaigns, this pre-testing can be done through qualitative methods like focus groups or surveys. In digital advertising, a common practice is running A/B tests or pilot campaigns, which can give you quantitative data (numerical data) on which ads lead to the most user engagement.

This experimentation phase is a form of advertising research that gives you cold, hard data on which creative approach works best.

You gather evidence to back creative decisions as you generate these audience responses. The insights gained here will help you improve your ads – tweaking the messaging, design, and offers that are most likely to drive engagement. 

It’s far better to learn and improve than to spend budget on an untested idea.

3. Ad campaign monitoring and real-time optimization

Once your campaign is live, the research shouldn't stop. From this point on, the goal is to track ad performance in real-time.

By monitoring key metrics as soon as the ads run, you can spot what’s working and what isn’t and make quick adjustments. Advertising key performance indicators (KPIs) to watch include impressions (how many people saw the ad), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS). 

Setting up a live KPI dashboard that aggregates these metrics across all your ad platforms will give you a comprehensive view of performance at a glance. This is where a tool like Brandwatch Measure is invaluable since it lets you build cross-channel dashboards in seconds.

Armed with real-time data, marketers can optimize on the fly. For example, if one ad creative gets a much higher CTR than another, you might reallocate more budget to the high-performer and pause or tweak the weaker ad. If mobile placements are driving cheaper conversions than desktop, you can shift spend in the moment. 

Using a unified social media management platform can help here as well. For instance, Brandwatch Social Media Management allows teams to plan and publish content (including ads) across channels from one hub. That coordination means when you decide to tweak an ad’s content or schedule, you can implement it swiftly across platforms.

4. Post-campaign analysis and insights

After an advertising campaign wraps up, your next task is to collect all the data and evaluate performance against your goals. This post-campaign research phase is where you assess the true effectiveness of your ads and learn some lessons to inform future campaigns. 

Start by reviewing the final metrics, then compare these to the KPIs you set. Pinpoint the aspects of the campaign that were most successful.

A comprehensive analysis typically includes looking at aggregate results (total impressions, clicks, conversions, spend, revenue generated) as well as segmented breakdowns. 

When you look closely, you might find one audience segment responded much better than others or one type of creative drove most of the conversions. Identifying these factors is gold for your next advertising strategy. 

Modern analytics tools make this easier by visualizing performance data. With Brandwatch Measure, for instance, you can quickly compile a report or interactive dashboard that highlights all your important campaign outcomes across channels. 

This not only saves time (no more cobbling data from multiple platform reports) but also helps uncover key insights – for instance, seeing all your social and web ad metrics side by side might reveal that an uplift in social engagement corresponded with a spike in branded search traffic, indicating a branding effect.

Beyond the numbers, consider qualitative insights, too. If you gathered any customer feedback during the campaign, review it to get an idea of sentiment and messaging success. Again, Brandwatch Consumer Research can be useful here: you can listen to social conversations during and after the campaign to see if there’s any shift in brand sentiment or an increase in people discussing your ad content.

Oh, and don't forget to look at your A/B testing results post-campaign as well. These findings will inform your creative decisions next time. 

It's important to remember that advertising research is a continuous learning process. Each campaign’s data should feed into the next campaign’s planning. If you embrace this continuous improvement cycle, you're more likely to see growing returns over time – and your advertising will become more and more tuned to what the audience wants.

Time to use data collection for better advertising campaigns

As with many marketing strategies, a data-driven approach to advertising is your best bet for consistent success. 

Advertising research empowers you to craft messages that truly speak to your audience and optimize every element of your campaign for the best results. 

Rather than guessing what might work, you’ll be guided by evidence at each step – making real-time adjustments and learning from each result. The outcome is better ad performance in the short term and a more brilliant long-term strategy informed by relevant insights.

Having the right tools amplifies these benefits. From consumer insight platforms to social media management tools, technology makes the research process a little bit easier. 

On that note, we'll give one last plug for Brandwatch Measure – a solution designed for tracking and analyzing ad performance across all your social channels, helping you turn heaps of data into clear, actionable insight. 

With an intuitive dashboard for your KPIs and the ability to continuously monitor and report on campaigns, it's all you need to support constant improvement in your advertising.