Resources

Consumer Surveys Fall Short of Predicting Consumer Behavior

Written by EDO Team | December 27, 2022
 

We’ve all been there. 

Finger hovering over the “buy” button or standing in a retail store aisle, trying to decide if we really need, trying to decide if you really need a 12th pair of sweatpants, another gadget for your phone, or that really expensive VR headset you’ve been pining for. We feel great about the purchase — hypothetically — but the marketing team behind that shiny new product of theirs doesn’t care about hypothetical customer emotions. They do care about tangible customer behaviors.

Consumer surveys tend to play out the same way. The traditionally small audience sample size feels that your ad will be successful, that if the product or service was something they intended to buy, they would, or at least heavily consider it. But there must be a way to know how many would act on that impulse if any.

This is why we at EDO recently launched a white paper called “It’s Time To Address Your Blindspot,” detailing ground-breaking research comparing 2,400 pre-market data points with actual in-market behavioral metrics — offering an unprecedented look into the effectiveness of modern-day marketing campaigns.

Here are a few things you can expect to learn.

Very few advertisers know how well their ads are working in real-time

We’re not talking about how people feel about a brand or an ad in real-time. We’re talking about whether people directly respond to an ad by searching for more information about the product or visiting the brand’s website in real-time.

EDO’s research reveals how incorporating current and historical data into in-market decision-making can help advertisers make better and more informed decisions, leading to improved ROI and performance. By understanding and responding to real-time customer behavior, advertisers can drive greater value from their creative assets and optimize their media spend to take full advantage of real-time marketing trends.

Predictive modeling surveys are capable of identifying bad ads, but struggle to define good ones

Our research concluded that surveys have no issue identifying bad ads. Their problem is identifying good ads, because many good ads break the norms embedded in most creative pretest systems. They know what won’t work, but they don’t know what will work — nor how to take a campaign’s existing creative assets and boost their marketing performance. 

EDO’s approach revolutionizes advertising by helping advertisers make the most of their creative assets. By using powerful data points and signals, combined with unique marketing tactics like creative rotation optimization, EDO can identify when an ad has reached its peak performance — or just getting started.

Real-time predictive analytics in marketing is not a myth

At EDO, we strive to understand better how customers interact with brands, products, services, and ads. And we know that failing to address blind spots in the creative testing process can lead to poor performance, wasted media spend, and lost opportunities.

By leveraging a combination of data science and predictive analytics, EDO has been able to help marketers identify high-performance creative assets that meet their impact and reach goals. The results? 5-20% ROI improvements over campaigns — driving more from their creative portfolios and optimizing media spend in real-time.


If you’re looking to drive the highest ROI from your creative portfolio, EDO’s “It’s Time To Address Your Blindspot” whitepaper is a must-read. Download the full whitepaper here, or request a demo with the team.