Testing Ads with Surveys

For the longest time, advertising agencies used focus groups to test their potential advertising campaigns. Focus groups, it’s believed, are an effective way to make sure that your campaigns are hitting the right notes. Participants get an opportunity to share how they feel about various ads, compare/contrast, and more.

But focus groups have several problems: People want to please the focus group leader. Sample sizes tend to be small. One or two people often lead conversations.

Focus groups are valuable, but they have flaws. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you’re utilizing every possible research strategy, and one such strategy is web survey software.

Ideally, you want to reach a larger sample, you want everyone to contribute, and you want to make sure that you’re getting more usable, objective data. Online surveys are the best way to do just that. Consider all of the following ideas: Surveying Your Target Market – Let’s say you’re planning on running an advertisement that appeals to football fans.

You can run a survey that sends the advertisement to 1000 football fans and see what they think, thus directly targeting your market. With focus groups, you may have too small a sample or you don’t have a targeted focus group. Either way you may not be getting the right information.

Post-YouTube Ad Testing – Nowadays, web survey software also allows you to utilize new technologies. Most advertisers now put ads on YouTube. Why not use YouTube as your “focus group” and provide a link to a survey that all of your visitors can access? You get far more data and real-world testing, all for very little overall cost.

Post-Commercial Testing – True advertising research doesn’t just take place before an advertisement is live. It also takes place after. Web survey software allows you to poll the success of all advertisements that are live, so that you can then see if there are improvements that can be made later.

Advertising companies that are hoping to maximize the success of all of their ads can benefit from focus groups, but online surveys are potentially more effective and very few of them actually use the services. They’re also less expensive to run and far more likely to have interesting data. If you’re an advertising company hoping to do better research, sign up with SurveyMethods today.

Our software is one of the best in the industry, all for a far more affordable price.