Digital marketing is one of the fastest growing disciplines within the overall “marketing” ecosystem. One of the main reasons is due to the quantifiable nature of the insight provided in real-time. While one may receive a large amount of data related to their business, the reviewer of data or even senior leadership may not be using the appropriate key-performance-indicators (KPI’s) to measure each specific marketing tactics impact.
Many companies are oftentimes blinded by the overall mission of their business, which may be to simply “sell more product.” This could be a hindering approach to developing successful marketing campaigns. In order to understand whether or not a campaign is effective, we should be identifying the most relevant metrics aimed at providing this insight for each and every strategy/tactic.
Julie Krueger, Retail Industry Director at Google, shared three main focuses when approaching measurement:
- Define the objective of each marketing tactic – don’t default to thinking that everything will directly drive a sale.
- Align the measurement for each tactic to the objective you are trying to achieve – don’t judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree.
- Identify the influencers + stakeholders in your organization and get their buy-in on the measurement plan before you run.
It sounds simple, but as we work with customers within retail and other industries, this advice needs to still be leveraged daily. Krueger also came up with a methodology to help understand the key types of customers and target efforts. These included SEE, THINK, DO, and CARE.
- SEE: Largest addressable qualified audience
- THINK: + have some commercial intent
- DO: + have loads of commercial intent
- CARE: + are current, loyal customers
To put this in context, Krueger leveraged Home Depot as an example:
- SEE: Consumers who play a role in maintaining their home
- THINK: + are starting to think about a home project
- DO: + are ready to make a purchase to do a home project
- CARE: + are current, loyal Home Depot customers
In order to add even more context to her point, Krueger mentioned another example where AT&T was trying to target millenials to drive higher brand affinity within this demographic. They decided to develop a channel on YouTube which presented episodes of “SummerBreak”, a show specifically developed for this audience. The show was a hit; millennials began adding comments on the channel, asking for additional episodes to be developed, questioning what happened to specific characters, and sharing the content with friends.
At large, AT&T most likely primarily measures their business by the shear number of subscribers in television or mobile they generate. Whereas this initiative was introduced to simply generate a higher brand affinity for this specific target demographic. Measuring the success of the channel and content by number of subscribers generated from this content would have been a HUGE miss. Instead, Krueger mentioned possibly leveraging KPI’s more relevant such as Interactions, Conversations + Amplifications + Applause, Brand Awareness, New Visits.
Below are KPI’s mentioned to the retail audience that are related to the different types of ways to measure content/tactics:
SEE (Exposure)
- Interactions (# or % interactions – platform/ads)
- Conversations + Amplifications + Applause
- Brand Awareness (Indexed increase in brand awareness)
- % of New Site Visits
THINK (Engagement)
- Click-thru Rate
- Watch time
- Per Visit Goal Value
- Page Depth
- Percent Assisted
DO (Commitment)
- Visitor Loyalty
- Checkout Abandonment
- Conversion Rate
- Profit
CARE (Love)
- Repeat Purchases
- Likelihood to Recommend
- Customer Lifetime Value
There are obviously many other KPI’s that one could develop for your specific marketing initiatives. The main point here is to treat each tactic as one that is unique and that is only measured on what it was intended to achieve, not by the default KPI of the site. Remember to define the objective, align the measurement, and identify the influencers and stakeholders to bless the selected metrics.
