Need to redefine marketing analytics

To begin with, identify the true indicators of performance

We live in an age of unlimited amounts of data. We spend significant sums on analytics, deploy any number of tools, and hire teams of people to “do” marketing analysis. Yet too often all of that activity becomes an end unto itself. There is a need for marketers to look at an alternative notion of marketing analytics that is less about presenting a volume and breadth of data gathered and more about focusing in on the specific things that can truly drive results.  
 
Most marketing campaigns are launched with a business goal, tied to sales or revenue. In an attempt to report on something, we produce reports on everything: the who, what, where, when and how. Impressions, clicks, likes, and shares. Pages of “marketing analytics”. But along the way, the connection between that data and the desired result often gets lost. Perhaps a better way to approach marketing analytics is to start with a robust understanding of the target customers and what their journey needs to look like to reach the business goal, and then identify a small number of KPIs (key performance indicators) that are true indicators of performance to focus on. If that goal, for example, is to increase the number of new cars sold in 2017 by 10 per cent, the first step would be to determine the car buying journey touchpoints that create opportunities to influence car brand consideration and preference. In a car purchase journey, there might be four touchpoint opportunities: information gathering, comparing selected car options, and visiting dealer(s), negotiating the deal. For each of the touchpoint opportunities, the consumer action desired would be identified and KPIs attached to each of those actions.

 
To simplify things let’s focus on the “information gathering phase” for a car purchase. The key touchpoint opportunities in that phase might be car searches (“what is the best SUV for gas mileage”, “what is the top-rated convertible”), visits to brand pages on car review sites, and traffic to car maker sites. For each of those opportunities the critical metrics might be different: for search, it might be search volume on high-value terms and click-through; for visits to review sites, video/rich media engagement; and for car maker’s websites, pages/visit. Once all of the initial KPIs are in place, the first round of analytics can begin:  Understanding which of the KPIs are key drivers to car sales. It may be that the KPI that has the biggest impact on car sales on a daily basis is getting video/rich media engagement from women on car review sites, meaning that when video/rich media engagement volume from women increases, there is a direct correlation to dealer show room visits. As a marketer, I could use that information to re-allocate budget to drive more women to those pages and optimise my media buys and messaging to that activity. In the real world there will be more than one driver to monitor and optimise, but staying focused on a few that are directly correlated to success will have a far greater impact on sales than trying to sort through hundreds of data points.

 
Clarity on who is the target audience(s), identification of critical touchpoints, and agreement on what are meaningful actions at the critical touchpoints requires a significant amount of intelligence, work and organisational collaboration. And the discipline to maintain focus on the determined KPIs over time is an additional challenge. That work and focus, however, will be rewarded with better information about reaching the right audience, intersecting them in the right places and in the right ways, and better business results.