An Easy Guide to Measure Your Digital Marketing Campaign Performance
To be able to make decisions based on data is what every organization is looking for but somehow still 87% of organizations are low in analytics maturity. It’s been a while since analytics is one of the sexiest words within business talks but still many haven’t figured out what to do about it. One of the areas where data is having the biggest impact is marketing, where data have been able to quickly translate to revenue increases and efficiency while changing from mad men in charge to math men. Marketing has made great use of technology trends to totally transform into a technology oriented and data oriented industry where digital is king.
Marketing Attribution Models
One of the most important, if not the most important, role a data analyst for a digital marketing agency have is to be able to attribute business results to the marketing effort. At the end of the day that’s what the client wants: to use a good marketing strategy to reach business goals. Measure attribution is also one of the biggest challenges because each time we use more channels to perform a single campaign and is not exactly easy to have a single 360 view of everything that is happening. Still, you can take a look at the most popular attribution models used right now:
- First touch attribution: conversion credit goes to the first channel where the user interacted.
- Last Touch attribution: conversion credit goes to the last channel where the user interacted.
Multi-Touch Attribution: This is the best choice since credit to the conversion is distributed among all channels where the user interacts. It could be equally distributed or you can add higher weight to channels at different stages of the funnel.
Being able to understand whats working best in the different stages of the user journey will give you insight on how to optimize and customize your efforts for different segments.
Marketing Analytics Measurement Plan
To measure attribution, and show your client that very valuable ROI, here are 6 easy steps to implement in your marketing analytics workflow to start measuring results and add value using data as a guide to increase performance, reach goals, and win customers:
- Document business objectives: What does our client want?
Is essential to have a meeting so you can gather all information needed regarding the upcoming marketing campaign. You want to understand what’s the main business objective and define goals. Is important to understand what is the current scenario regarding this goal and try to get them to share some data with you so you can better understand their business. The client should be able to define what success looks like but if that’s not the case help him get there and be as specific as possible. An example of this could be: “I want to increase online sales by 5% vs monthly average” or “I want to change the perception of my brand after a PR crisis that affected X business line” or “I want to increase customer engagement so I can do more cross-selling of X product”. Sometimes you can’t have a meeting, in this case, a well-structured onboarding form could work.
2. Identify strategies and tactics: What is the plan to reach that objective?
Another meeting needs to happen right after documenting objectives and requirements. This time you should meet with the team in charge of executing the campaign, sometimes the media strategist or buyers. They were part of the previous meeting or probably had their own and had an idea of what the media plan should be for this marketing effort. Depending on the situation, you might make recommendations based on historical data for example: what channels to use, where to invest more, targeting strategy, creative formats, etc. After sharing your analysis and providing recommendations a plan should be set and you should be in the loop with both client objectives and media plan to reach them.
3. Define KPIs: What metrics will be used to measure performance?
Now that you understand the objective and the strategy to reach them is important to define the key performance indicators. KPIs are not always clear to define and depends on the effort. Some examples of KPIs based on campaign objectives could look like this:
These KPIs should be shared with the media team so they know what metrics they should focus on and based on what their plan will be evaluated. They also should be shared with the client so they understand what metrics they should pay attention to once access to the campaign real-time dashboard is granted. Equally important as defining KPIs is setting benchmarks or goals for those KPIs. Most times metrics mean nothing without context. We all hate to see presentations where a bunch of numbers are presented but there’s no idea what the numbers meant and if they were positive or not.
4. Design measurement plan: How are we going to track those metrics?
Once you know the campaign’s objective, the plan to reach that objective, and the KPI is time to make sure those metrics are traceable. There could be many possible variables here: Where do the conversions take place? What channels will be used? Website design etc. but we can mention a couple of things that will always be needed:
- Naming conventions: All ad platforms(Social Media, SEM, Display, etc.) have the same naming structure:
For this, we must design a structure to name all three levels to make it easier to work with the data generated and be able to work on better segmentation that could also lead to better insights. This article helped me understand it much better. Think about the different variables that you would like to be able to slice your data and work on a spreadsheet to help maintain consistency in the data entry.
- UTM parameter: This will be part of your naming convention spreadsheet. UTM or just URL parameters are IDs that you insert into the URLs that will be attached to your ads. The logic here is to have a different URL for each ad so when you look into your web analytics tool reporting you will be able to segment data based on the ad that brought them to the website. With this done you will be able to attribute actions/conversions to the three different levels we mentioned before: campaign name, ad set name, and ad name. The best way to work this is together with your naming conventions’ spreadsheet but Google also made a tool that could help too.
- Website events: Most likely, you will have a website where users will be generating different events and conversions. If you use a web analytic tool like Google Analytics, you will be able to create events that will help in understanding user behavior and measuring success. You can measure what triggers those actions and try to optimize your campaign based on that. To create web events and store your marketing pixels I recommend using Google Tag Manager.
5. Report results by visualizing data: Let everyone know what’s up
I wrote an article about my recommendations for analytic tools based on your use case. Dashboards are a standard tool in every business since are one of the main ways to monitor the performance of your KPIs in real time and in a way that could be easily shared among all business owners. Having a good dashboard will help democratize data and increase self-service since the dashboard will help to answer the most common questions and a bit more. Is important to agree to a design with the business owners and do a walk-through with them once the dashboard is finalized. The dashboard should be complemented with narrative and storytelling that will help all users, especially those who are not so data-oriented. Use the tool that better fits you but in the end it would be nice if it looks something like this:
6. Analyze and optimize: What we learned and how to do better.
By applying statistics to your database you will be able to generate findings that could lead to actionable recommendations. Those recommendations could be tested with A/B testing and monitored it with your dashboard. This should be a continuous cycle of executing findings via data analysis and executing a more optimized version of what you tried first and should look something like this:
By entering this test-learn-execute process you can expect to see positive progress in your KPI’s and overall effectiveness of your campaign.
Conclusion
Marketing analytics are key to being successful in marketing and are key to creating transparency both internally (within the different business users in your organization) and externally with your client. Being able to track performance will give you a big edge against a bunch of organizations that are way behind in their analytics and digital transformations. If you can at least go through these 6 steps you will have a path to keep growing from basic to king of the hill in no time. Good luck!
