Improve Your Analytics by Measuring & Communicating the Right Outputs

Marketers Still Struggling to Quantify Their Value

For years marketers have been using purchase intent, brand lift, and likeability research to prove marketing effectiveness to management. With today’s demanding competition and budget constraints, the C-Level wants even harder data before investing in marketing.

How would you grade your marketing organization for its ability to demonstrate its value and contribution to the business?  A recent survey asked this question to C-Levels and here’s what they answered:

 73% of companies do not measure marketing’s contribution to business goals.  That’s almost ¾ of all marketing departments who do not even look at the business as a point to measure against.   No wonder the C-level is skeptical.

How will management realize the value of marketing if it isn’t measured and communicated in their language?  Why would we as marketers ever want the CEO, COO, or CFO to draw their own conclusions from data that doesn’t connect back to the business

 Insight  ⇒ Measure Outputs

Consider Metrics As Business Outputs, Not Inputs.  To better understand what we are communicating, it is important to differentiate what metrics are inputs and what are outputs.

Inputs include a combination of:

• Impressions,
• Clicks
• CPM – Cost per thousand
• CPC – Cost per click

Outputs are metrics that communicate a full scope of business results

• Sales (or sales lift) generated via marketing investment
• Leads (or lead conversion lift) generated
• Audience engagements with the brand
• Purchase intent and brand consideration lift
• Share of Voice
• Brand sentiment lift
• ROI (return on investment)
• CPA (cost per acquisition)
• CPL (cost per lead)

Insight  ⇒ Communicate Outputs

Here are 3 rich data points that you should communicate to top-level management to help them understand that marketing is a revenue generator, not an expense on the bottom line.

• Sales return on marketing investment in $ and %
• Lead generation rate for specific marketing initiatives
• Brand engagement rate trends before, during and after campaign

Do This  ⇒  Four Tactics to Track & Optimize Business Goals

• Cycle through and select media vendors that you can trust and work closely with them to optimize your campaign on a continuous basis
• Incorporate retargeting to advertise to an audience that is interested, but not yet committed
•  Simplify analytics to track media against your conversion goal and communicate only those relevant to the business goals … take the time to measure & report what matters
• Deploy Marketing Automation to link marketing initiatives to leads and sales.

Not That  ⇒  Stop Merely Checking Off the Analytics Box on Your Task List

• Stop handing off your entire budget to a big mobile/web ad tech provider to place, optimize and track your performance … this is simply asking for bot/content farming placement and a waste of your ad dollars
• Stop setting-up retargeting and then leaving it alone … we’ve seen many retargeting campaigns that last for months even though the prospect has either purchased or stopped the specific product search months before
• Stop using every bit of data in analytics reporting for the sake of not missing anything