Can You “Hear” Your Marketing Performance?

Picture this: you’re at symphony hall, patiently waiting for the performance to begin. One by one, the musicians start tuning up – a violinist plays her violin while a harpist plucks her strings and a percussionist adjusts his tympani. Each instrument eventually starts playing a different snippet of music, and musical chaos quickly ensues. Then the conductor taps his baton and suddenly the room falls silent. Finally, the moment everyone has been waiting for – the orchestra begins playing the evening’s program and beautiful music fills the hall.

Much like making music, marketers need all of their channels to work in concert to maximize the quality of their performance. Today, organizations are tasked with making sense of all the data being produced by more channels than ever before, and marketers are under constant pressure to measure and prove the success of each of their efforts. Cross channel attribution – the process of allocating credit to all of the marketing touchpoints that contributed to an eventual conversion – provides you with a way to “hear” which channels, campaigns and tactics are delivering the most value. But in order to gain insight into this performance, the data from every marketing channel must be read from the same sheet of music.

The Same Sheet

Different marketing channels are often managed by different teams, departments, locations and even third-parties such as agencies. This makes it very challenging for organizations to establish a common set of data rules and formats required to piece together disparate data in order to perform cross channel attribution. But unless a standard data format is defined and enforced, the disparate data will remain disparate, chaotic and unusable.

What’s Essential to the Performance

There are two crucial data components used to measure and optimize your overall marketing performance: the attributes that describe specific marketing tactics (publisher, creative, frequency, etc.), and the metrics that describe the results of those tactics (revenue, ROI, conversions, impressions, etc.). These attributes and metrics are essential to the marketing attribution process to enable more accurate marketing spend decisions, across all your channels.

Depending on the marketing channels you’re using and the data you’re gathering, the attributes and metrics across all of your channels may not be exactly the same, but they do need to be mapped and aligned into the same categorization format in order to be compared correctly. For example, the creative copy used in display media would be comparable/mapped/aligned with the advertising copy used in paid search ads. Display ad impressions would be comparable to email opens, etc. You need to establish the categories into which each data element from each of your data sources (both attributes and metrics) should be mapped. That way, when all your data sources are combined within your marketing attribution solution, comparable data is fully aligned.

The Sooner You Start Playing, the Better

Since a statistically significant quantity of data is necessary to generate meaningful cross channel results, a good marketing optimization strategy takes time to develop. The sooner you begin collecting data, the sooner you will generate enough data to derive actionable insights and further visibility into your marketing performance. Like making beautiful music, ensuring that the performance of each your channels can be analyzed in concert with the others will enable you to “hear” and “tune” the performance of your overall marketing ecosystem.

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