Sales slow? You need campaign analysis

Black Friday, the holidays, Christmas...these are all peak shopping periods and the ideal time to get your best campaigns out there to generate major sales. But what if these 'special occasions' are less than spectacular and your campaigns are not delivering the returns you'd hoped for? You need to do a post-campaign analysis to help you better plan your next campaign.

Campaign analysis delivers valuable insights by providing an overview of a brand's campaign executions across all media on a monthly or quarterly basis.

It analyses the communications message, highlighting the spend on ad type, ad theme (Black Friday, Christmas etc.), the title of the campaign and the products that were advertised to provide specific, useable data.

Analysis done in this way, especially over a longer period, reveals shifts in brands' campaign strategies. It illustrates what a brand is communicating to the consumer and how your competitors are gaining market share, highlighting periods of maximum efficiency.

This is valuable in understanding your advertising return on investment - especially if you're wondering why your campaigns are not performing as expected during what should be bumper sales periods.

Campaign analysis also has the power to deliver comparative insights around consumer shopping habits. If year-on-year data reveals that your customers are increasingly spending more on Black Friday purchases, that could well account for your declining sales over Christmas shopping days.

The same goes for Singles Day. It's a shopping day that's steadily garnering worldwide consumer support online, and could present a significant opportunity for sales at the beginning of November (adding to protracted festive season spending).

Although still relatively new, campaign analysis allows you to gauge how your customers are responding to Singles Day campaigns and if your target market would benefit from increased campaign activity to take advantage of this growing sales event.

Campaign analysis reports the campaign spend of your competitors and could potentially reveal how your customers are responding to your creative executions, as sometimes they're not spending less in favour of your competitors, they're just changing when and how they spend with you.

This process highlights potential areas of growth for your campaigns, revealing what consumers responded to positively in competitor campaigns and during which sales periods. It also provides an opportunity to learn from your competitors' mistakes, and not repeat these in your own campaigns in the future.