What is the Impact Score and How to Analyze It?
Each of your brand lift studies contains an Impact Score, summarizing your campaign performance in one number. Here is everything you need to know about this Happydemics proprietary metric!
Introduction
The Impact Score is a unique performance metric designed to provide a holistic view of your advertising campaign's effectiveness. Rather than analyzing individual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in isolation, this score combines all performance indicators of a brand lift into a single, standardized measurement that ranges from 0 to 100. This unified approach enables you to quickly assess campaign performance vs a benchmark and make meaningful comparisons across different campaigns and media channels.
Objectives of the Impact Score
The Impact Score serves several objectives in campaign analysis:
Campaign Summarization: It consolidates the performance of your entire advertising campaign into one comprehensible metric, giving you a holistic view of your advertising campaign's effectiveness.
Comparative Analysis: The score facilitates easy comparison between different campaigns, regardless of their media mix or campaign objectives, by providing a standardized measurement framework.
Benchmark Positioning: It positions your campaign performance relative to benchmarks based on media types, industries and/or geographic zones, giving you clear context about where your campaign stands in the competitive landscape.
Strategic Decision-Making: By providing a single performance indicator, it simplifies the decision-making process for campaign optimization and future planning.
Multi-Campaign Analysis: Average Impact Scores enable comprehensive analysis across multiple campaigns, allowing for deeper insights through various analytical dimensions such as industry or media types performance, geographical effectiveness, and so on.
Calculation Methodology
The Impact Score employs a sophisticated calculation that accounts for performance variability across different media channels. The formula is:
Where:
xᵢ = Uplift vs benchmark for KPI (i) in the campaign
xᵢ₋flop = Average uplift vs benchmark for KPI (i) in the worst benchmark measurements
xᵢ₋top = Average uplift vs benchmark for KPI (i) in the top benchmark measurements
n = Number of KPIs in the campaign
Important Note: The number of top and flop measurements varies based on media type:
Most Media Types: Use top 25 and flop 10 measurements
Specific Media Types (TV, In-game, Social media, Radio, and Influencer): Use top 5 and flop 5 measurements due to limited available data for these channels
The calculation process involves three key steps:
Individual KPI Assessment: For each KPI, the campaign's performance is measured against the benchmark and positioned relative to the best and worst historical performances for that media type.
Normalization: Each KPI score is normalized using variable performance thresholds based on historical data, ensuring realistic and contextual scoring.
Averaging and Scaling: All normalized KPI scores are averaged and scaled to a 100-point system for easy interpretation.
Conditions to Calculate Impact Scores
Several conditions must be met to ensure accurate and reliable Impact Score calculations:
Sufficient Benchmark Data: The system requires adequate historical performance data to establish meaningful top and bottom performance thresholds for each media type, industry, geographic zone, or any other criteria selected in the benchmark. We require a minimum of 15 data points in the benchmark for each KPI to be included in the Impact Score calculation.
New Media types: Require at least 15 measurements before an Impact Score can be calculated.
KPI Coverage: An Impact Score can be calculated with as few as one KPI that has sufficient benchmarks (15 data points). However, you should be aware that in such cases, the Impact Score will reflect only a small portion of your campaign's overall performance and may be highly volatile. We recommend relying on an Impact Score only when you have sufficient benchmarks for all your KPIs, or at most when you're missing benchmarks for just one KPI.
How to Read and Interpret Impact Scores
Understanding your Impact Score is straightforward once you know the scale:
Score Range: 0 to 100
0-25: Significantly below average performance
25-45: Below average performance
45 - 55: Average performance (campaign ranks within the overall average of its benchmark)
55-75: Above average performance
75-100: Exceptional performance
Key Interpretation Points:
A score of 50 indicates your campaign performed at the median level compared to similar campaigns in your media mix
Higher scores indicate stronger performance across multiple KPIs
Lower scores suggest areas for campaign optimization
The score reflects relative performance within a specific benchmark. If you change the benchmark dimensions (media types, format, targeting strategy, platforms, industries, zones, countries…), the impact score will also change.
Warnings and Considerations
While the Impact Score is a powerful analytical tool, several important considerations should guide its use:
Data Dependency: The accuracy of your Impact Score is directly tied to the quantity of benchmark data available. Insufficient data may lead to more extreme scores.
Evolving Benchmarks: As more campaign data becomes available, benchmark thresholds may shift, potentially affecting historical score comparisons.
Complementary Analysis: While the Impact Score provides an excellent overview, it should complement, not replace, detailed KPI analysis for strategic decision-making.
Benchmark Selection Dependency: Impact Scores are relative to the specific benchmark selection used for calculation. Any changes to the benchmark selection criteria will directly affect the resulting Impact Score.
The Impact Score represents a significant advancement in campaign performance measurement, providing marketers with a clear, standardized metric that simplifies complex multi-KPI analysis while maintaining the nuanced understanding necessary for strategic decision-making.
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