TOP TEN DATA ANALYSIS ADVERTISING TIPS
(in no particular order)
#10 Do not track and measure everything
Just because it is possible to track all kinds of metrics does not mean you should. The natural instinct of anyone running an online campaign is to measure everything in order to try and learn about the campaign at maximum granularity. In my experience, this usually results in a virtually endless amount of wasted time. For example, if you are tracking a paid search campaign, do you really need to know what the average position is for each keyword across all search engines? If you are running online videos on different sites, will you be using the ‘video play rate’ in any of your analysis? If you are running a mobile marketing campaign, do you really need to track ‘send to friend rate’ and ‘enter phone number rate’ across all mobile ad networks?
Primary data needed for measuring online advertising campaigns
If you are planning to use data analysis in order to measure the impact of online media, I suggest you ask yourself this one question – “What analysis will change my future media buys?” If you stick to this principle, you will likely focus on basic campaign data such as clicks, impressions, conversions, media spend, and website traffic data. If you have any thoughts or opinions on this statement, please share. Also, if your client is running both traditional and online media, you definitely want to track GRPs.
#9 Maintain a media dashboard
The purpose of maintaining a dashboard report is to have all the primary data available in once source so it can be easily accessed (for any data analysis projects) and everyone working on the account can get a holistic view of the campaign. In my opinion, the dashboard report should be updated by an online marketing analysis and distributed monthly to the client and account teams. It should be a running 13-month report so you can compare performance to last year. In addition, I recommend that it be no more than two pages with 6 charts on each page. Charts can include useful information such as:
- one chart showing trend line of unique visits and page views
- one chart showing % of referral traffic from different sources like (organic, paid, display, direct, etc)
- one chart showing media spend broken out for each channel
- one table showing you basic website data like visits, page views, page views per visit, time on site
- one chart showing you media results data like (newsletter sign-ups, registrations, conversions, sales, etc)
- one chart showing you share of voice in the online market place (will explain more later)
- one chart showing you brand awareness (if you are tracking brand awareness data using a 3rd party)
As you can see, there are all kinds of information that can be included in a media dashboard, these are just a few ideas. If data can be tracked weekly, even better. I will be providing step-by-step video, audio and written instructions on how to create a media dashboard in the near future and will make them available on SmartDigitalSpending.com
If you have any opinions or comments, please share. Below is a cartoon that shows the need for dashboard reporting.
Dashboard Reporting
#8 Create a Quarterly Media Mix Table
In my experience this is one of the easiest tables to construct that can provide valuable insight as to how your media mix contributes to campaign success. Surprisingly, not many advertisers create such a table which is a shame. As you can see below, broken out below is a list of media channels and the amount of spend that has been allocated to each channel per quarter. As you can also see, I listed two KPIs (unique visitors and Registrations) and the amount of volume that was generated for these KPIs per quarter.
You don’t have to use unique visitors or Registrations, but I recommend inserting at least one key performance indicator in this table. Total media spend is calculated and a ‘cost per unique visitor’ and ‘cost per registration’ is calculated. This provides insight as to how much advertising budget was spent to achieve these goals and how efficient that spend was.
Another table can be easily created showing the percentage of spend that is allocated to each channel. In this example, I highlighted the quarter that generated the highest amount of unique visitors and registrations which happened to also be the most efficient quarter. It turns out, allocating a majority of advertising budget to online channels like display, search and mobile led to generating very positive results.
This should be a very easy table to create if you already have a Media Dashboard in place. Stay tuned for the rest of the tips. No one else provides such easy tips on how to evaluate advertising campaign performance as easy as OnlineMediaAnalyst.com!
If you have any thoughts or opinions, please share. Thanks.
Eric Melchor
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