How to measure the performance of a brand campaign?

[Hyponeros]

We are planning to launch a brand awareness campaign using mainly Google placement and Yahoo content network. We are not really expecting lots of conversion therefore we are looking for other ways to measure the performance of our campaigns.
What I came up so far is on one had the CTR (if it is higher than 0.04%) of my campaigns, the average time spent and average page views of the users that clicked by banners compared to site average and on the other hand the impact on the traffic and on the visitor loyalty.

What do you think?

Do you have other suggestions? How else would you measure the performance of your brand campaign?

[poster_boy]

I think your initial ideas are good ones, another option is a 'lesser' conversion - instead of a purchase, perhaps an email opt-in, sweepstakes entry or interacting with a widget of some sort - could be a lower bar to reflect interest and/or interaction.

CTR (if it is higher than 0.04%)

Why is 0.04% the success threshold? Seems rather arbitrary.

[Mark_A]

If your branding campaign is clear and your brand name also your domain, you could also track type-in visitors.

[Hyponeros]

#Poster_boy: Thank you for your suggestion. I will see what we can do.
Regarding the 0.04% CTR, it was not arbitrary but for any reason I had that number in mind as average CTR for banner. Meanwhile I found new (2 years old) numbers.

#Mark_A: I am not sure what do you mean by type-in visitors?

[eWhisper]

When running 'awareness campaigns'; here's a few metrics I like to measure:

Changes in brand searches
Changes in total website visitors
Changes in search CTR
Changes to overall conversion rates
Time on site (and page views per visitor) from the brand campaign
Conversion rate from the brand campaign

I'd suggest adding a call to action on the landing page such as signup for our newsletter; or some action besides just total visitors so that you can extract additional value from the campaign.

I find that many times banners look useless when examined in isolation; however, while they are running if you experience a 10% increase in branded searches or a 0.5% increase in conversion rates, etc only during the times they are active - then those banners might be more successful than originally thought when you take a holistic look at your marketing efforts.

[Mark_A]

#Mark_A: I am not sure what do you mean by type-in visitors?

I mean people who just type your domain or brand name directly into a browser address bar. They demonstrate that they remember your brand or domain enough not to need a search engine to find it.

For me there are only a few type-ins, the BBC News is one and a few others which I have come to learn. Not many, those that are have achieved significant top of my mind awareness. A possible strong aim of a branding campaign.

[RhinoFish]

i think in terms of branding, traffic, conversions campaigns.

the things you seem to be talking about are more traffic type things for me.

for just pure branding, total imps is my measure. i know that sounds basic, but my experience tells me two different adwords consultants / operators can achieve very different results. knowing how keywords and placements and targeting interact is crucial to this effort. if one person get 24,000,000 imps in a week and the another operator gets, 2,000,000 the other things people are saying to measure are off target - you'd be looking too closely at the problem (like you would for conversion campaigns).

behind imps i'd measure view thru conversions, making sure i didn't look over too short a horizon. more here:
[adwords.google.com...]

have fun!

[Hyponeros]

#eWhisper: Thank you for your suggestions. Sounds very good. I like especially those off site metrics (such as brand searches)

#Mark_A: Got you! Thanks

#RhinoFish: I didn't take into account impressions because we want to run our campaigns on the content network and we have less controle on where exactly the ad will appear. If most ads are at the bottom of a page where they are barely seen, I will still see impressions but the users will not have seen my ad.