Paid Metrics

Measurement and Control of Online Advertising

Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.

Goals & Analytics

Platforms

Reporting

On-Going Optimization & Testing

Measurement and Control of Online Advertising

Online Advertising Optimization through Data- Driven Decision Making

Goals, Metrics, and KPIs

Data Needs Goals to be Interpreted

Most digital advertising drives traffic back to your website, it’s there where you can really determine if you’re reaching your goals.

Google Analytics contains a tremendous amount of data. It’s easy to get lost in it. Add on the other tools and there are more metrics than we can count.

As always, understand your goals first, then you’ll know what data to look for and if you’re meeting them.

The goal of digital marketing is to reach and engage the right audience. Analytics play a key role in optimizing these efforts.
Through the analysis of data, marketers can identify what works and what doesn’t, allowing for continuous improvement.
Digital Marketing Analytics is the compass that guides marketers through the vast digital landscape.
By incorporating analytics into our marketing efforts, it ensures that strategies are not just a shot in the dark but a calculated journey toward success.

Some General Aims Digital May Help With…

Acquisition

Activities aimed at gaining new customers.

Retention

Activities to increase the likelihood of a customer purchasing again, and/or increasing the profitability of those purchases.

Recovery

Activities aimed at recapturing past customers before they abandon you altogether.

Make Sure They’re Aligned with Business Goals.

‘Get more Instagram followers’ alone isn’t good enough.

(Usually)

Anything set for email and online advertising must be in alignment with marketing goals, which roll up to corporate level goals.
Must Be SMART

Connect Metrics for Powerful Results

Goals & Objectives Example

Goal

Generate an average of 215 new platform leads for new homebuyers through various online channels in 20XX.

Objectives

Acquire 150+ new leads per month through informational pdf downloads.
Increase new monthly email signups by 50%.
Confirm an average of 20 home tours performed per month in 20XX.

Measurement and control require goals and objectives. This is the basis for our control activities.

Clear the Clutter With WAMM

What Are Analytics?

The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website, ad platforms, 3rd parties, and the competition, to drive continual improvement of the online experience of your customers and prospects, which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline).

Analytics provide insights that help marketers make data-driven decisions, optimize marketing strategies and assess the overall success of marketing initiatives.

The goal of digital marketing is to reach and engage the right audience. Analytics play a key role in optimizing these efforts.
Through the analysis of data, marketers can identify what works and what doesn’t, allowing for continuous improvement.
Digital Marketing Analytics is the compass that guides marketers through the vast digital landscape.

Traditional Marketing Limitations

It’s expensive – production costs and limitations on reach contribute to the costly nature of traditional marketing.

Targeting is challenging – It can be a lot harder to define and target specific audience segments.

It’s harder to measure – not only is it difficult to attribute success from many traditional mediums, gaining real-time analytics is generally not possible.

Expensive.
Hard to Target.
Hard to Measure.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing has many benefits that make it a great choice for marketers.

Digital marketing has a number of benefits, one of which includes the ability to effectively track success.

Some specific benefits include:

Easier to target – precisely target based on demographics, interests and online behaviours.

Saves money – Often requires less budget as it eliminates the need for developing physical assets.
Easier to measure – There are many tools that provide robust data and tracking capabilities that are accurate and timely.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Analytics tells you what’s working and what’s not

They create tangible results.
Shows business leaders’ concrete proof.
Opens opportunity to get more resources (people, money or both)
Quells negative feedback from internal stakeholders.
Embeds a learning mindset into the team.

Helps you make the right decisions based on data.

Where We Access Analytics

CMS & GA

Website Platforms

Each website CMS system offers its own version of web analytics. These are rather simple and not of much utility. For example:

Squarespace
WordPress
Wix

Google Analytics 4

The best of the best for free Analytics systems. This tool gives us significant control over our analytics story.

Analytics 360 gives more options for organizations but costs a bit of cash.

Sotfware

Other Analytics Software

GA is not the only option out there. Many others have Analytics software that gives detailed access to metrics like GA, but they usually cost significant dollars. For Example:

Adobe/Omniture
Bing Tools
Kiss Metrics
Many Others

Social

Social Analytics

All social platforms have an analytics system built in for organic and paid.

Some are better than others.

All give insight into performance-based metrics.

Platforms

Advertising Platforms & Email

Just like social, advertising platforms and email platforms all have their own analytics programs. Most of them only show performance metrics for their particular area on their own, but most can be leveraged and moved into other reports for more clarity.

Anything Google owned merges together with GA nicely.

Analysis

Competitive Analysis

Some tools specifically are leveraged to look at competitive situations.

Alexa
SpyFU
iSpionage

All of these tools collect data in different ways. One will rarely give you all the data you require accurately.

Qualitative & Other

We have plenty of tools that can gather other types of data that is of value to an organization. These can come from either qualitative or quantitative sources. Some common ‘other’ types of data tools are ones like:

CRM.
Survey tools (I.e. Survey Monkey)
Heat mapping.
Audio to text.

Start with a clear definition of qualitative data. Explain that qualitative data is non-numeric data that describes qualities or characteristics, often gathered through methods such as interviews, observations, or open-ended survey questions.

Analysis

Additional Tools for Linking and Maximizing Value

There are additional tools that work in conjunction with your Analytics platforms to help merge and manage all critical information where you desire it. Some of these tools are:

Tag Manager.
Zapier.
Dashboard tools.

These tools don’t necessarily collect the data but make it easier to link and analyze. They are giving you more control over the data.

Reporting, On-Going Optimization & Testing

Slim Down to What Matters

In our world, marketing research and analytics, the word insights has come to represent ,data puking. (I blame Facebook)

It has come to represent telling people, with dozens of reports or eighty slides, that water is wet.

AVOID THE DATA PUKE, find the metrics that matter.

(Data puke refers to the notion of showing as much data as possible with no clarity as to what the data is indicating. Essentially overwhelming the viewer)

Connect Data Sources for the Bigger Picture

In many instances, data from many places needs to be centralized.

Links can be built between them. A common way is through UTMs

UTM Campaign Tracking

How do you know if Facebook is a worthy investment, or if you’re getting enough traffic from your recent promotional campaign? The answer: UTM tracking links.

UTM codes help you track where traffic is coming from, allowing you to properly measure each campaign’s, platform’s, or medium’s ROI

Campaign Manager

Reporting Options

Dashboards
Dashboards are used direct out of the analytics tool they are gathered in.

Direct Exports
Exports to CSV are common ways to report on data. Tend to not look too pretty but have hard data.

Reporting Options

Excel or Other
Many reports get created in excel or other simple document tools.

Custom Reporting Tools Tools like Looker Studio or Power BI are useful in pulling in information from many sources.

Looker Studio

Optimization

Optimization refers to the process of refining and enhancing various activities involved in digital marketing strategies and campaigns. This can include optimization of budget, targeting criteria, copy, CTAs, keywords, content structure, and more.

Optimization leads to better results, often based on data-driven insights and continuous learning.

The Three-Pronged Approach

The three pronged approach to optimization typically refers to a strategy that involves focusing on three key areas simultaneously to achieve optimal results.

By improving on these three groups over time, the holistic business improves at a steady rate.

Winning with Analytics

Don’t stop at insights, Reach For Those Out-of-Sights!

If there is one thing the universe agrees on, it is that you shouldn’t just provide data… You should provide INSIGHTS!!!

But why stop at what we can see, Look for opportunities to get deeper and assess what can be seen beyond the fray. We call that Out-of-Sights. And it means, getting a look at what can’t be seen without intelligent and deep analysis.

Example

Insights: As in, the blue line is 20% above the red line. I CAN SEE THAT! Or, life-time value of California purchasers is 3x when compared to those who reside in Georgia.

Out-of-Sights: As in, the blue line is 20% above the red line because our biggest competitor launched a new product and priced it 10% below our best product. You are explaining the performance using data obtained beyond the scope of clickstream data. That is 2.0 stuff.

Continuous Improvement Over Time

Using the information we gather from analytics tools, we can implement adjustments to improve our desired outcomes from online advertising as they pertain to our overall goal hierarchy and our strategy on-going.

Continuous Improvement Over Time

Define continual improvement as an ongoing process of making small, incremental changes to processes, products, or services to achieve better results over time.

Emphasize that continual improvement is a core principle of quality management and is essential for organizations to remain competitive and adapt to changing circumstances.

Incremental Continuous Improvement

We want incremental improvement overtime.

Discuss the benefits of continual improvement for organizations, such as increased efficiency, enhanced quality, reduced costs, and greater customer satisfaction.

Highlight that continual improvement fosters a culture of innovation, learning, and adaptation, empowering employees to identify and implement improvements in their areas of expertise

Example

This is an example of Amazon’s checkout over the past 10 years. It shows how, by watching the data, Amazon was able to make adjustments to their system to serve their users better while maximizing their desired outcomes at the same time. Over this period, they made many improvements that were a ‘win-win’ for both Amazon and their customers.

In Conclusion

Tracking, analyzing, and optimizing are fundamental to any online advertising activity. The internet allows for sophisticated data gathering, so it is possible to track almost every detail of any campaign and adjust as needed, on-going.

Pick a Canadian Business and give us some optimizations.