Measuring the effect of marketing campaigns provides a platform to defend, and increase, the marketing budget. From the CMO’s perspective it is also a way to increase his/her influence in the company. When marketing is evaluated against clear and relevant goals, it won´t be dismissed as something that maybe has an effect on revenue and profit. Also, provided that the marketing proves successful, it shouldn´t be subject to cutbacks in bad times.
Some kind of follow-up is usually always done for digital marketing: For example CTR-statistics for banners on different sites, cpc-conversions registered in AdWords etc. etc. But the problems occur when this follow-up isn´t coordinated:
- The numbers won´t be directly comparable as they are provided by different partners/systems and they mean different things.
- It is time consuming to collect all information, delivered in different formats, from different systems and partners.
- The lack of clearly defined goals will reduce the relevance, and understanding, of the statistics you finally end up presenting.
Two things are crucial to get acceptance in a company for the results of the evaluation:
- You need to set goals that are in compliance with the company´s overall business goals. Meeting the goals will then prove that marketing is drivning the business.
- You need to have a method for your campaign evaluation that is proven and transparent; this will eliminate time consuming questions and discussions on how you ended up with certain results and what they actually mean.
Companies many times don´t have a clue what revenue/outcome is generated by e-mails compared to paid search, compared to organic search, compared to display ads on big media sites, compared to a video on Youtube etc, etc. In previous evaluations I have seen that inexpensive media can often be more efficient than more expensive media. The decision to invest a small part of the marketing budget in campaign evaluation should be relatively easy to make based on the fact that substantial quick wins can be made from the insights you get from the first campaigns you measure and evaluate.
Let´s simply find out which half of the marketing spend that is wasted, and reallocate that money in the next campaign to where it has more effect.
Andreas Franson, andreas[@]internetintelligence.se, +46 733 56 41 51
