Marketing Analytics and Measurement Approach

Metrics are a hot button topic and companies are constantly being told how they can improve workflow, engagement, return on investment and just about anything with the right data. Let’s be honest, simply gathering and even gathering and analyzing metrics does absolutely nothing if you’re not looking at the right metrics and data points. Which begs the question, what ARE the right metrics?

Lets explore a process to arrive at the right measurement points which will ensure you have the right data. First, lets think about what your business goals are overall, & how they are achieved. Are you an eCommerce business that has one business goal – getting consumers to add products to a shopping cart and having the customer check out, the main variable being AOV? Are you a manufacturer that puts products into market through a variety of direct & indirect channels? Are you a business that provides consulting services on a semi-bespoke basis? There are a wide variety of business models out there and an even wider variety of measurement approaches. My point is, there is not a one-size-fits-most approach to this, the transactional models are potentially complex and require exploration.

We’re going to use a simple example, a B2B distributor that has two primary ways to engage with prospective clients: a web form, requesting a quote and a phone call, also with intent to request a quote. From this action-step, prospective clients are presented with options that will fit their unique needs and ultimately, a transaction occurs.

Create a master list of methods by which your business drives prospects to these desired actions. What executions are you using today? What are available to you but are maybe not in market at the moment? What is the cadence to their use? Here’s a general list:

• Digital
• Hybrid
• Offline
• Channel

Each of these top-level buckets can be further broken down, dependent on your business and unique situation. Lets break down digital for this example:

• Paid Search/ SEM
• Programmatic Digital / Display
• Paid Social
• Organic social
• Organic Search

Some of these will require additional breakdown, for example, Paid social will require you to delineate the tactical execution and the source, for example: Twitter vs Facebook. Sponsored posts vs Ad Units. I think you get the point... Each of these executions / tactics will have different metrics that roll up to a KPI. Paid search, often, will require you to align metrics to both search ads and retargeting to a KPI for the channel.

Once you’ve made a list of all the available demand drivers for each business goal, identified metrics that align to the KPI’s, then you can define the KPI’s that these individual executions should achieve. Is this a cost per conversion metric? A cost per qualified lead? A return on investment threshold? Or any one of wide variety of others. Once you’ve worked through the steps outlined for each Goal, KPI & all the metrics you’re ready to document these as a tracking plan, which now needs to get configured in your measurement source of truth.

We recommend that you engage a professional at this stage unless you have expert level analytics talent within your organization. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are an often used, very powerful solution that can be configured to provide you with a clear view into the measurement points that you just detailed in your tracking plan. Its very likely however, that you organization already has a measurement platform, if its not the Google solution described above, it could be Adobe’s Analytics Suite (also known as SiteCatalyst) and may require some attention, in the form of reconfiguration to support your new tracking plan.