Best practice for campaign reports

Whether you’re launching a product, hosting an event, or raising organisational awareness, a campaign report is the best way to showcase the successes to stakeholders in an easy and digestible format. Measurement also helps teams to improve, compare strategies, and understand the true value of events and campaigns.

Campaign reporting isn’t only about evaluating what happened in the past, you can also use media analysis to support you before and during a campaign.

By following this framework for your campaign reporting, you’ll be able to:

• Set meaningful KPIs and understand the media landscape (before)
• Respond to the media and receive analytical support from a team of experts during a busy period (during)
• Showcase your successes to stakeholders with insightful evaluation and a greater understanding of what worked well and what didn’t work to identify opportunities for future campaigns (after)

Before your campaign

Goals 

Before your new campaign begins, it’s time to set up clear goals and meaningful KPIs. This will help provide everyone with a clear direction of what is to be achieved and help with the future measurement of assessing the success of the campaign.

Consider the following:

• Who do you want to target?
• What message do you want to send, and what action do you want your audience to take?
• Where does your target audience go to consume traditional media?
• When is the best time to launch the campaign?

For example:

A mountaineering rescue charity may want to analyse its summer mountain safety campaign. They may want to target novice hikers with the key message to be prepared while hiking this summer. This charity have particular issues in the North of England,  so want to target local media in that region, during the summer heatwave.

SMART Goals

With goals in place, you can set realistic SMART KPIs that align with your overall campaign objectives (SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

For example:

The mountaineering charity would like to increase the volume of campaign coverage by appearing in 400 outlets between 5 June – 4 July.

Or, they would like to increase the amount of headline mentions from the previous year by 5%.

Using historical or Industry Data

Once you’ve established your campaign’s goals and KPIs, use data to establish benchmarks to ensure your targets are SMART. Effective comparisons could be to your competitors, yourself, or the industry, and without data, you’re basing decisions on nothing more than a gut feeling.

Using data allows you to:

• Assess against industry standards or pre-determined goals
• Track progress over time if you compare it against your own previous campaigns
• Hold yourself accountable by setting measurable targets
• Say no to ideas that have underperformed in the past

For instance, the mountaineering rescue charity may have run a similar campaign the previous year and found that they achieved coverage in 300 outlets and a key message penetration of 35%. It would be unrealistic to set a goal of 100% key message penetration if the previous year had a 35% penetration, so an organisation can use this information to set a realistic target against last year’s results.

Vuelio can support you during the pre-campaign period with analysis of competitors or previous campaigns that can allow you to identify opportunities and threats.

Choosing the right metrics

Deciding which metrics to include is important, as the campaign report needs to reflect your SMART goals in a simple way that stakeholders in the wider business can understand.

Base your metrics on what best demonstrates your SMART objectives. This is especially the case with sentiment and proactivity analysis. Unless your campaign is to combat a negative reputation, sentiment will generally be positive, and the campaign itself is proactive, so consider other metrics such as the following:

Campaign-Specific Messaging: Track whether your intended key messages are being portrayed in the media e.g. How much coverage was the key message ‘When hiking this summer, be prepared and take water’ featured in?

Calls-to-action: Analyse if the media has included your campaign actions e.g. Head to mountaineeringrescue.co.uk to find out more about hiking safely this summer.

Prominence: Assess not just the volume of coverage about the campaign, but also the quality – are you appearing in headlines or as passing mentions?

Target Media Analysis: If your goal is to gain attention from specific media outlets, a detailed analysis of these results is necessary, e.g. Mountaineering Rescue is targeting local charities in the North of England so have compiled a list of relevant outlets in the region. It’s worth utilising a media database, like Vuelio’s Media Database, if these are journalists you haven’t worked with before.

The Vuelio team can support you with choosing the correct metrics. The team also typically provides manually analysed metrics that will allow you to analyse bespoke campaign metrics such as campaign messages.

During the campaign

Establish a useful reporting framework

During the campaign, it is important to continuously assess progress with the use of snapshot reports. These reports can help your organisation showcase immediate success, or respond to media reactions that may not be favourable or in line with messaging.

While you may already produce a campaign report at the end of your campaigns, sometimes this can be time-consuming. Vuelio’s Insights team can provide support during busy campaign periods on an ad hoc and ongoing basis. Many of our clients enlist us to provide them with multiple campaign reports per year to utilise our expertise, while some clients require our services on an ad hoc basis.

After the campaign

Once the campaign has finished, it is time to assess if your organisation has met its KPIs. At its core, media measurement is a continuous improvement process.

It may also be useful to consider if any additional data sets would add value to your reporting. For example, it may be useful to understand if donations, sales, or website traffic increased during the campaign.

Finally, when your campaign has ended and all analysis has been completed, you can then use this report not just as a summary of your campaign but as a benchmark for future work.

Find out more about campaign reporting and how Vuelio can help here.