Marketing is built on the pillars of diligent measurement and accurate attribution.
As marketers, we can effectively track every step along the user’s path – even if that includes different devices and interactions with multiple channels. Meanwhile, proper attribution will help assign weighted credit to each tracked touchpoint and allow you to identify which channel is bringing you the most value and ROI.
Understanding this relationship is crucial in today’s digital world. Like the five senses we use to navigate the world around us, in the discipline of measurement, we also use a similar count of senses, each aimed at giving us a grasp on how to measure performance accurately.
Here’s a breakdown of the five senses of measurement we like to use when auditing your measurement practices:
1/ Tracking
What metrics should you look at?A common fallacy marketers fall into is that they only focus on one metric or channel to base their decisions on, but there are so many more data-points we can track.
- Page views: This measures the number of instances a user loads a particular page from your website on to their browser.
- Ad clicks: This metric counts the number of times users have clicked on our ad to reach an online destination (typically a landing page for a product or awareness campaign).
- Ad impressions: This would count the total number of times the ad is displayed on someone’s screen while browsing online.
- Post engagement: This metric is typical for Facebook ads, and it measures the total number of actions users take, typically in terms of likes, comments and shares.
- Bounce rate: This measures the percentage of users who navigate away from a website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can typically be fixed by improving UX.
- User interests: This data provides information about the age, gender and demographics of users.
- Referral: This metric helps us understand how users find our website (beyond Google) and what they do once they get here.
2/ Counting
How should you determine one unit?An empirical element within the discipline is the counting procedure used to determine one unit. The importance for counting comes down to accuracy. For example a user can finalise the purchase of two items on your site, which in measurement terms, should register as two conversions from a single user. Therefore make sure that what you are counting is reflective of what is actually happening.
proper attribution will help assign weighted credit to each tracked touchpoint and allow you to identify which channel is bringing you the most value and ROI
3/ Valuing
How do you attribute value to conversions?By attributing value to your metrics you can instantly see how your decisions effect the bottom line. What’s the value you are attributing to each lead? Are they all equal? By attributing the profit element within each purchase or lead generated you can also estimate the value created from your marketing efforts directly from your dashboard.
4/ Incompleteness
Are you looking at the full picture?Additionally to online metrics, in order to get the big picture, we need to include the tracking of events that are happening in other third party tools or outside the digital eco-system. Here we’re talking of offline (in-store) conversions and cross-device conversions. Be sure that the data reporting tool you use allows you to upload data sets that could include both offline conversions and cross device purchasing through account details or parallel cookies attributed to user accounts. This will ensure that the data presented is accurate and is a good representation of what’s happening in your business.
5/ Lookback
What period of time should your consider in the analysis?The final sense of measurement is to become a master of time and manage historical events within the timeline of what you are observing. In essence how far should you look back in order to review the results generated from a change in strategy or the launch of a new feature on your site or campaign? 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? Keep a calendar of all the changes to track and then map out metric progression against them in order to analyse the effects of your previous decisions. Quick tip on this: You can add annotations within Google Analytics directly on your reports.