First Thing First: Baselines

Like most teenagers my high school existence was a flurry of seemingly continuous activities. In the moments when swim practice, AP homework, after school jobs, and looming college deadlines seemed overwhelming Mom would say the same thing, “pause, take a deep breath, what’s first?”

I’ve continued this moment of reflection in my professional life and it has paid dividends…especially during campaign kick-offs. Given the immediacy and flexibility of digital advertising it is not uncommon for campaigns to go from media brief to live execution is less than a week. Media buyers are all too familiar with the campaign that needs to be live ASAP to start affecting KPIs. This is why many publishers, rightfully so, tout they’re turnaround time as less than 24 hours. One of the planning parameters to get lost in the shuffle is one of the most important, baselines.

Campaign objectives are typically explicit but often baselines are not. We know the goal is increased sales but don’t know the starting point. Omitting baselines makes gauging campaign effectiveness (an already complicated task) much more difficult. This is why baselines are so important. You can’t improve what you aren’t measuring. Unfortunately, this issue doesn’t arise until during the campaign wrap-up report and there’s no point in closing the stable door then.

If you’re lucky enough to have campaign historics or a long-standing client relationship accessing old data should, hopefully, be simple. But, what if this is a new project/client? How do you proceed then? Ideally, the client will have GA, Mixpanel, Piwik, or another analytics tracking company incorporated into their site and you can pull KPIs from that. Pull data for both the month and the year prior to account for any seasonality changes, assuming it’s available.

If the info can’t be accessed and there is enough time to gather the data then identify and track the key pages for at least one month before the campaign start. Be sure to include any publisher pixels to start building a cookie pool and painting an audience. Also the conversion confirmation pages should be tagged separately from the other pages as your visitors aren’t necessarily your converters and vice versa.

Establishing baselines during the initial planning stage gives media partners a starting point, allows for more pricing flexibility, provides conversion funnel insights, and highlights key audience characters. Of course, all of these factors improve campaign performance. So, listen to Mom and remember first thing first.

You should probably call her too.