Closing The Loop: Using Accurate Metrics To Focus Strategy And Measure Success

Online marketing is particularly focused on measuring results, in part because the innate ability to get those accurate measurements is one of the key advantages of online marketing over offline efforts.  Those attractive charts and graphs are one of the major selling points when working to convince a client to divert some of the budget he has been spending on direct mail to an HTML email campaign. 

However, preliminary analysis of data on the front end of your online marketing efforts can also be a great way to ensure greater effectiveness and better end results.  Analyzing relevant metrics prior to beginning an initiative can direct your creative and implementation strategy, making it more focused at the outset, and serving as a benchmark and creative plumb throughout the process.  This results in tighter, more effective campaigns.

Not paint-by-numbers creative
Does the use of statistical and demographic data in the initial planning and strategy phase of a project result in less creative, out-of-the-box thinking? Absolutely not. 

“Having an accurate picture of the end goal and a better understanding of our target audience is freeing, rather than restrictive, to the creative process,” says Jeremy Williams, Art Director at LeapFrog Interactive.  “It’s much more difficult to generate really exciting ideas directed towards a vague or uncertain goal or audience.” 

An excellent example would be two recent LeapFrog projects, both complete online rebrands for major financial service companies.  One client provided some general direction and description of their target audience and the goals of the site.  The other client provided specific demographic data, including age, income level, and lifestyle information for their target audience. 

While both projects eventually arrived at creative directions that exceeded client expectations, the initial process of developing creative concepts for the data-directed project was much faster, with fewer rounds of revision necessary.  Digital sketches required fewer revisions to reach the composition stage, and draft copy required less editing to become final.  Additionally, the specific message and call to action for each page could be targeted to a more specific audience and voice. 

A clear picture of the starting point
Another advantage to pre-campaign data-mining is the ability to do accurate benchmarking.  While it’s useful to know the number of impressions and the demographic or geographic information of the audience during a major push, having a point-in-time reference before the campaign creates a richer and more useful data set for follow-up. 

Did the campaign reach a new and different audience?  If the overall impressions or conversions didn’t increase significantly but came from an entirely different source, then that can be a good indicator that some split testing to pull in separate audiences might be in order.  Perhaps this client is a good fit for behavioral or other targeted media. 

This is where having skilled and experienced marketers available to analyze and draw conclusions from the data becomes important. 

Increasing confidence for non-marketers
In a recent study*, only 7% of financial executives said they were satisfied with their company’s ability to measure marketing ROI.  The survey also indicated that less than 20% of those financial executives have full cooperation and an open dialogue with marketing to establish metrics, and 10% had confidence in marketing’s ability to forecast its impact on sales.  With such disparity between financial executives’ perception of ROI, it’s important that marketers, whether in-house or agency, be able to speak in the language of the CFO—numbers, statistics and reporting, and that they be able to do so regarding all phases of the marketing effort. 

Data-guided marketing: a continuous process
One thing becomes clear when dealing with analyzing project success against statistical data.  Continuity is an invaluable asset.  The benefits of statistical measurement at both ends of a project or campaign are multiplied exponentially when an agency develops a long-term relationship with a client that allows for data mining across multiple campaigns. 

Online marketing is all about agility.  The ability to track and respond quickly to changes in user behavior patterns and market changes is reliant on accurate data and on having seasoned experts available to interpret that data and translate it to an effective creative strategy that continues to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.