Many digital marketers assume their campaigns will be inherently easier to track, since they comprise more digital tactics. However, there’s a wide gap between counting in-feed video views, for example, and knowing how those video views drive business outcomes.
This makes it challenging to gauge the effectiveness of marketing efforts across various channels and tactics. Because disparate channel-specific metrics are hard to stitch together to tell a coherent story, marketers often lack a multichannel view of campaign performance.
The key to a successful marketing measurement plan is to shift focus to the audience’s point of view and view marketing as a series of opportunities to elicit a response.
Step 1: Map and track audience exposure to your marketing campaign
Let’s say your campaign includes several new channels, but you aren’t sure how to gauge their individual success, or the success of your overall campaign. First, map your marketing campaign as a set of potential user paths leading to desired outcomes. Start with your target consumer and visualise the channels your campaign uses to reach that customer. Next, show what happens if users respond – perhaps they’re sent to a landing page, or a microsite.
Use your map to verify that you’ve implemented appropriate tracking throughout the entire process. disciplined tagging using a unique universal campaign ID is essential.
Step 2: Measure the three types of user responses
Members of your audience can respond to a marketing exposure in three distinct ways:
Action: Measurable interactions in response to marketing that can be tied directly to business outcomes. Examples include clicks on paid search or banner ads leading to a landing page and purchase. Action metrics are the most straightforward and easiest to measure. For example, clicks on display ads lead to the business outcome of filling out a lead form or clicks in an email lead to scheduling an appointment. Many martech vendors and channels provide simple measurement reporting for most action metrics.
Engagement: Measurable expressions of interest or consideration in response to marketing that can’t be tied directly to business outcomes. Examples include video views, social comments and microsite visits.
Not all types of engagement are equal. For example, a person who completes a one-minute YouTube video demonstrates deeper interest in the content. One hypothesis is that longer engagements are worth more. This offers a useful baseline when comparing user engagement across channels.
Quantifying weighted engagement can help you compare campaigns, channels, platforms, tactics and creative assets. Savvy digital marketing leaders will find out the role engagement plays in driving purchase or another key action before placing too much emphasis on engagement as a success indicator or driver for optimization decisions. Your results should feed back into your engagement weights.
Perception: Responses to marketing that can be measured indirectly, often through a survey or social listening. Examples include changes in awareness, purchase intent and perception.
Perception does not necessarily result in an action, especially in the short term. As a result, it is measured using indirect methods, such as surveys to measure things like salience, awareness, recognition, perception and association.
Step 3: Create a unified measurement plan
Digital marketing leaders should prioritise defining the success of their campaign strategy. A campaign aimed at increasing awareness or consideration of your brand should be judged on how much it lifts perception and engagement, or increases the actions taken by customers. Map key metrics by channel, determining the composite success values based on this and the weighting given to each. Next, layer cost and benefit data into the composite success metrics, using them to calculate cost per acquisition as well as overall ROI. Consider the value across action, engagement and perception.
The next step is to repeat and improve this, viewing each campaign as a learning opportunity. Evaluate which campaigns did and did not achieve desired results, compare success targets with actual results and explore where measurement methodology and tools can be improved for next time.
Lizzy Foo Kune is VP analyst, and Rachel Smith is principal analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice
