Starcount’s Campaign Effectiveness solution leverages a rich source of open-banking data to provide media professionals with a simple, clear, and quantified way of understanding marketing impact without the need for PII.
The reporting is based on actual customer spend to focus in on how the media activation has impacted real-world consumer behaviour, moved the needle against the competition, and generated ROI.
Starcount’s measurement goes beyond the understanding possible through 1st party data alone by contextualising performance through an analysis of the competitive landscape and examining how the campaign shaped shopper behaviour in the market. As a result, the report enables clients to go beyond simply what happened, to dig into the deeper why behind the numbers.
The measurement challenge in 2025.
No discussion of measurement is complete without the obligatory reference to the eternal Wanamaker quote ‘half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’.
Of course the picture is not as bleak as it once was as media measurement has come a long way in the following century thanks to advances in data science, technology, and the availability of data sources, that have enabled ever more complex models for attribution and incrementality.
However, the modern age brings its own headaches as a fractured media landscape means that marketeers have to harmonise the distinct methodologies from a plethora of 1st party and 3rd party sources which can result in long lead times to get the final results.
In addition, GDPR, cookie depreciation and a cookie-light future makes attribution across digital channels an even more difficult task. This comes at a time where marketeers feel ever more pressure to demonstrate short-term ROI for their media spend.
With Marketing Week reporting that only a minority of marketers (47.8%) feel confident in their ability to measure effectiveness, it is clear that brands need more weapons in their arsenal to help them navigate the complex and changing landscape.
Introducing the geo-lift test.
So, what is a geo-lift test?
Simply put, geo-lift tests quantify the impact of media activation by comparing the performance of a brand across 2 or more groups of geos during the campaign versus an equivalent pre-campaign period – most commonly examining geos exposed to the media versus unexposed control geos. The ‘lift’ is the incremental difference in performance between the 2 groups, for example in the below scenario the uplift in the Exposed Group’s spend is +50%.
The essential foundation of a geo-lift test is the creation of representative exposed & control groups to ensure that you have a benchmark to objectively assess performance. This means identifying geos with equivalent audiences using metrics such as brand or category penetration, market share, spending habits & demographic profiles.
A geo-lift methodology has several distinct advantages. Without the reliance on PII data it is a future proofed solution that clients can rely on long-term. It is channel agnostic and can be used to track sales across omni-channel and media channels e.g. digital, social, OOH. And it is a simple solution that enables you to get a clear understanding of incrementality and test the impact of different creatives, media channels, and audience targeting strategies.
The Starcount approach.
Starcount’s solution is flexible and tailored to the client’s specific needs.
The effectiveness report focuses only on the geos and metrics that matter to you – including spend, basket size, frequency, and many more – to ensure reporting sheds light on how the campaign performed against your KPIs.
Critically brand performance is contextualised by bringing in the relevant competitive set, category benchmarks, and a holistic view on shopper spend. This provides not simply clarity on campaign impact, but also insight into the drivers behind the numbers to provide tangible learnings that can help to optimize future activations.
Clients can bring Starcount in at any stage of the process, whether during pre-planning using the Connect platform to find the best geos for activation, with the creation of representative test cells, or simply brought in for the campaign measurement.
The 24 month lookback window means that clients can engage Starcount long after the campaign has been completed, and have confidence in a quick turnaround with an initial read of the data available as soon as 24 hours after the campaign has completed.
All of this is underpinned by Starcount’s rich open banking data that captures merchant spend on thousands of the UK’s biggest brands – including Retail, Hospitality & Leisure, Finance and many more verticals. The depth and breadth of the data provides the flexibility to design solutions that align with your brand, category and campaign objective.
Coming soon: Starcount is expanding its data sets through the addition of search data in Q4 2025. The prospective inclusion of search data within the Campaign Effectiveness solution suite would provide clients with new perspectives and insights on the media impact through the purchase funnel.
1. Defining your geos.
Starcount can be brought in pre-campaign to create the exposed & control groups, or the client can share the campaign geos after the activity has run which will be ingested into Starcount’s data lake.
2. Campaign Analysis.
The brand performance will be measured during and post-campaign versus pre-campaign to provide a clear quantified understanding of the marketing impact across all the key metrics.
3. Learnings.
The effectiveness report is tailored to the client and campaign to help dig into the why that underpins campaign performance and to provide learnings that can enhance future activity.
Ready to future proof your measurement? Get in touch with our team today to learn more about our measurement solution.
You can book a meeting in with one of our sales team here or contact us at team@starcount.com
