I listened to a few different speeches about measuring and tracking marketing from Top SEO Service. Each presentation highlighted the challenges of measurement, the number of channels vs. individual channels, and the selection of the right kind of metrics. Today, we are challenged by the fact that the purchase decision is not straightforward. Bram De Jonge’s (Adroll) presentation mentioned that there may be more than 50 different encounters on the journey before the goal is met (Carried out by Cisco). Ever since the customer visited the company’s website for the first time. How can we measure the impact of these meetings (online, offline) on the whole?
The presentation by Bram De Jonge (Adroll, Marketing Technology) outlined well the evolution of marketing measurement. “Before,” effectiveness was measured by impressions and clickthrough rates, but this is far from what marketing is ultimately intended to accomplish.
Today, your metrics are the number of clicks your ad receives and its cost (CPC). Some companies are already further away, allowing us to measure the conversions generated by marketing. Performance measures include conversion cost and marketing ROI. ROI (Return on Investment) is a figure that tells you how much money invested, i.e., capital has brought back a return to the company, ROAS similarly tells a return on the money invested in advertising to the company.
However, the direction is that we would be able to measure the effectiveness of marketing and interventions from the first encounter to the purchase decision. In addition, we could easily identify those channels that produce results in the short and long term. This day is reflected in the fact that the measures chosen are very tactical campaigns and we forget about developing a long-term brand and awareness. In order for the cost item debate to move forward, the measure of marketing success is the turnover growth figures and the value of the customer base. For many players, this trend may already be the present, but there is a lot of basics to be considered in measuring marketing.
It is important to understand the impact of an individual channel on the whole, but without an overall goal, we cannot understand well enough the effectiveness and direction of marketing. The marketing summary view should tell us operational information, i.e., in the direction right and are we moving towards goals? Easy metrics (such as tracking the number of fans, tracking the number of visitors to a website, the number of impressions or clicks, and the results of an individual campaign) alone do not tell you how your marketing efforts are impacting your business.
A simplified example of this: a company selling expert services that want to increase awareness and thus sales. The sales target for 2020 is € XX. Marketing is done by events and sales-driven by sales staff. The goal of marketing is defined as generating contacts through online channels.
In this case, the sale does not take place directly from the website, but the customer can submit a request for quotation/contact. Based on this, it is good to make an analysis of the current situation: how many contacts come through online channels and analyze the marketing and sales collaboration, i.e. how many contacts we make a purchase in which case the goal is tied to the sales goal.
The goal is, for example, the number of contacts via online channels = the goal of digital marketing, which can be broken down into a monthly goal.
From this equation, we can calculate the approximate number of contacts required. In other words, “marketing” undertakes to generate 25 sales contacts per month. And when we work to get a certain number of contacts per month through the online service, the number of visitors to the website often increases in this context. We can track the overall increase in awareness based on the number of visitors to a website, but the goal of marketing to increase the number of visitors alone is not a sign of success.
The Nut to Bite – Building a Summary View
During the day, I attended a workshop where we considered implementing a marketing summary view. It is good to visualize the marketing as a whole as a marketing summary report, which, in addition to the basic figures, provides information from the perspective of the goals. These summary reports can be created e.g. Using Google Data Studio or Databox.
So, a workshop-based assignment to build a summary view 🙂 In the summary view, different things can be emphasized based on what kind of data is available and how accurately we measure product manufacturing costs as part of digital marketing and sales development.
A similar set of metrics can be built by modifying an operator that does not directly make sales online, but the website is responsible for, for example, generating contact requests.
