Golden rules for Marketing Measurement Framework

Need for Marketing Measurement: 

With the increased spending on marketing campaigns across multiple channels by e-commerce marketers, measuring marketing spends has become the need of the hour. Marketing measurement helps the retailers to know how marketing efforts are driving the revenue and give actionable insights to improve the results. 

Marketing measurement can be used for 

• Identifying which marketing channels (Email, Social Media, etc) and campaigns are successful in achieving the targets in terms of customer acquisition and ROI 
• Determining which marketing channels and campaigns are inefficient, not profitable, or not a good use of marketing resources 
• Gaining insight into the customer base and their behavior in greater detail 
• Identifying most valuable customers and determining what their needs are to attract a greater number of similar customers by personalizing campaigns 

All in all, it helps in creating successful, data-driven plans for future marketing efforts. 

How should it be done? 

Accurately measuring marketing performance has always been one of the major pain points for marketers. Marketers can overcome this issue by moving to a holistic model of measurement strategy that establishes how business goals will be measured. This strategy follows a path beginning with a top-line business objective, which is then broken down into measurable goals, KPIs, and finally ways to segment those KPIs.  

Organizations that tie marketing metrics directly to business objectives are 3 times more likely to hit their goal 

Google Study 

Marketers can drill a little deeper by measuring the success of efforts made at each stage of the marketing funnel. 

Awareness Stage: 

Increasing brand awareness by targeting relevant audiences becomes the crux of marketing goals at this stage. Marketers can assess it using KPIs like impressions, number of new visitors to the site, etc., and then segment the results by traffic source to give insights into which platform drives the most traffic. 

Consideration stage: 

At this stage, consumers are searching for something they want and are seriously considering a product. Marketers’ goal here should be to target higher-intent audiences and turn awareness into purchase intent. One way to measure intent for paid search is to check click-through rates (CTR) which indicate higher/lower engagement with an ad. From a site perspective, this could be measured through the number of page views per session.   

Purchase Stage: 

Here, marketers’ goal is to turn consideration into action and increase sales, thereby revenue. Understanding the metrics like conversion rate (CR), cost per acquisition (CAC), and return on ad spend (ROAS) will help in uncovering sales trends and tweaking strategies to convert more visitors into buyers. Also, analysing average order value (AOV) gives an insight into the quality of customers who are newly acquired. Marketers can segment the results by product category to assess cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. 

Retention Stage: 

Repeat business is a crucial factor in growing and scaling any business. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can lead to an incremental profit of 25-95 %. In the long run, it is cheaper to retain existing customers (and build their loyalty) than to acquire new ones. Analyzing metrics like customer lifetime value (CLTV) and repeat purchase rate help in identifying the most valuable customers and businesses can customize marketing efforts to retain them. 

Challenges Faced in Marketing Measurement: 

Some of the common challenges faced by the business while measuring their marketing campaign’s effectiveness are: 

• Difficulty in directly relating digital media metrics to marketing objectives. These metrics require additional levels of analysis and mapping to propose an effective conclusion 
• Campaign related data extracted from multiple marketing platforms (Google AdWords, Facebook Ads) can be very large, making it cumbersome to analyse 
• Drawing insights from data accumulated from multiple mediums require highly experienced and skilled resources with planned workflows. Setting up such functions within the business takes a lot of interest and special efforts by the business 

Things to be avoided in Marketing Measurement: 

Collecting and analyzing the wrong metrics: 

There are too many marketing metrics to choose from, increasing the chances of choosing irrelevant and unmeasurable performance indicators. Vanity metrics are those that measure the activities rather than the results. They focus on quantity over quality. For instance, pageviews is an indicator of increased brand awareness but standalone doesn’t give complete information. It’s crucial to dig deeper and pay attention to sources and mediums to determine which channels are contributing to a spike in pageviews.  

Using the wrong tools: 

While most marketing platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook, email) provide measurement and analytics, businesses can see the data collected from each channel only. This siloed approach to data collection does not give the business a holistic picture, especially now that omnichannel marketing is the name of the game. As business is reaching its audience via multiple platforms, it needs to make sure that these customers are not counted multiple times in analytics. Instead, the business can use analytics tools that allow it to consolidate data from all channels so it can see how each customer interacts with its brand and attribute every sale accurately to understand the effectiveness of campaigns. 

Using the same strategy for desktop and mobile: 

40% of consumers only perform searches on their smartphones. Since they use desktop/laptop computers and smartphones/tablets differently, it is crucial to separate data based on device types to measure results and inform improvements. Marketing content may perform very differently when viewed on desktop and mobile due to different screen sizes, behavioural patterns, and user intention. As such, businesses should adjust their message, set KPIs, analyse data, and optimize marketing strategy for each type of device individually. 

Conclusion: 

Every business, whether big or small, needs a measurement plan to get the best results out of their marketing endeavours. It is never too late to create a holistic marketing measurement plan which helps marketers to give their marketing efforts a structure. Once the measurement plan is in place, regular maintenance of it will keep data clean, fresh, and relevant to the ongoing marketing trends.