Ad Pre Testing: What is it For?

What is ad pre-test?

Are you thinking of launching a new campaign? Advertising Pre-testing or Ad Pre-testing is a market research method that allows brands to get consumer feedback and test advertisements before launching a new campaign to ensure its effectiveness. Read on to find out all the details!

Ad pre-testing is a type of advertising testing that allows brands to measure the impact of a new advertising campaign for a product or service before launching it to improve the ad performance and ensure its success. In this way, brands can know to what measure their creative idea will be accepted or rejected by their target audience and if any significant changes need to be made to optimize the launch, thus securing their advertising investment.

Taking into account that pre-test advertising aims to identify the future behavior of the consumer who the campaign will impact, the study can be carried out with unfinished executions, i.e. with an advertising storyboard or an animatic testing, and with the finished advert.

In addition to the previous analysis of the ad campaign, once it has been launched, it is essential to evaluate its performance through an advertising post-test to measure the advertising effectiveness. Alternatively, you can follow up on the different campaigns by continuously measuring them through Advertising Tracking.

What can be measured with an advertising pre-test?

The research carried out with an advertising pretest allows you to measure different aspects of a campaign:

• Brand awareness: What level of recall do we achieve among the target audience?
• Engagement: is the brand remembered, and is it associated with the campaign being evaluated?
• Comprehension: did we convey the desired message, does the consumer associate the message with the product or service, and is the language most appropriate for the target audience?
• Diagnosis: how does our target evaluate the campaign? Does he/she understand the value proposition? Does he/she perceive it as credible? Is it new and different?
• Brand positioning: what brand values does the campaign convey? Does it work on the desired attributes?
• Persuasive power: does the campaign arouse enough interest among the public? Would they be willing to buy the brand/product?

Importance of pre-testing in advertising

The pre-test’s importance lies in assessing whether the advertising efforts actually contribute to achieving the brand’s commercial objectives. In other words, it is a relevant study to measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns to be carried out.

In addition, the advertising pre-test helps to verify that the advertisements communicate the desired brand image and do not provoke adverse reactions among the target audience.

The production cost of a creative advertisement is a small part of the total investment of the advertising campaign, so modifying it before launching it can avoid launching a product or service that is not understood, or at least not in the way the brand expects. Therefore, testing the campaign before its launch utilizing an ad pretest makes it possible to get a return on the advertising investment.

The advertising pre-test is especially important for high-profile campaigns such as the Christmas campaign, and those in which a large scale advertising investment is made, for example, a Super Bowl ad, in which 6.5 million dollars can be paid for a 30-second spot.

Advantages of ad pre testing

• Provides effectiveness data before the launch of the campaign.
• It helps to improve the quality of the creative idea.
• It helps to identify and correct elements that generate rejection among the target audience.
• Allows the message to be adapted to the language of the consumer.
• Having a finished campaign is unnecessary, as the study allows you to test sketches (advertising storyboard and animatic testing).
• It is possible to test more than one campaign for comparison purposes, whether from the same brand or the competition.
• It allows copy testing and testing of advertising concepts.
• It can help to increase the ROI of a campaign, improving the conversion rate, as well as the brand positioning.

How to do ad pre testing?

When carrying out an advertising pre-test, it is important to take into account different aspects to ensure a representative result that is as close to reality as possible. To do so, it is essential to

• Use a representative sample of the target group.
• Present respondents with clear instructions on the dynamics of the study.
• Collect in the questionnaire the key questions that allow you to obtain the leading indicators (KPI’s) that help evaluate a campaign’s effectiveness. The Zinklar platform offers a pre-test template to create the most optimal questionnaire to achieve the desired objectives.
• When there are different creative ideas for the same product or service, we can use monadic, sequential monadic and comparative tests to evaluate them.
• Take advantage of solutions that allow you to create effective studies regardless of your experience. For example, Zinklar offers Guided Solutions so you can design intelligent and automated studies without any barriers.

Enter Zinklar and discover the potential of the advertising pretest template to test all your creatives quickly and easily!