And how can you do it better?
By: Lauren Lovvorn
You’ve done the analysis, allocated your budget by marketing channel, and launched your campaigns. Now what? Do you just wait until the campaign ends to perform analysis? Or do you make in-flight decisions to help you reach your target KPIs?
Tracking in-flight campaigns is crucial for marketers to measure the effectiveness of their strategies and make necessary adjustments to optimize performance. Let’s take a closer look at what that looks like.
What metrics should you use to measure campaign performance?
Ideally, as your digital campaign is in progress, you will use real-time monitoring by data source using metrics like cost-per-click and conversion rate to help assess performance. But what does that look like?
Let’s pretend we are a marketing team with a goal of 10,000 new website leads in Q2. We are running a campaign with paid ads in Display, Paid Search, Paid Social, and Television (see our Help Center for more information regarding how ChannelMix Marketing Impact Model™ can help you allocate this budget).
Let’s evaluate our performance halfway through the campaign. We are going to look specifically at three metrics: our marketing spend so far, the number of website leads, and the cost per website lead.
What to look for when assessing performance?
You will want to evaluate these metrics at two levels: holistically and by channel. Let’s do so now using the ChannelMix Pacing Performance dashboard.
So how are we doing?
We are halfway through our plan and we’ve only spent 42% of our total budget. So at this point, we know we probably need to be spending a little bit more. We will get to where to spend that money in a moment.
We are at only 30% of our website lead goal. So we probably do need to shift a little budget around or we aren’t going to make that goal.
Lastly, we can see that we are paying $47.88 for each lead. We can use our historical data to see what our previous cost-per-leads ranged.
Now let’s check out channel performance.
First of all, with the more complex customer journey of our modern-day consumer, attribution is dying.. Learn more in our recent webinar.
What does this mean in the context of my campaign pacing? While I may not get many leads directly attributed to Display, it doesn’t mean my Display spend is any less valuable. That’s where media mix models, like ChannelMix’s Marketing Impact Modeling™, provide value to your marketing budget.
In the example above, you can see that based on my marketing strategy, I am underspending on Display and Paid Social and overspending on Television.
Based on this analysis, my actions today should be to cut back on my Television spend and increase my Paid Social and Display spend.
How can you do this and how does ChannelMix make this easier?
- To get good data for analysis, you need standardized, cleaned data all in one spot.
- Next, you need to create calculations on that data. These are the metrics that tell your full marketing story.
- What is your cost per lead? Your cost per interaction?
- How many of your impressions lead to clicks?
- How many of those lead to website conversions?
- How do these metrics break down by marketing channel?
- You need an informed way to plan your budget. (See ChannelMix’s Marketing Impact Modeling™).
- You need a way to measure that success in real-time as your campaigns are in flight so you can make strategic changes to help reach your goal.
ChannelMix makes all of this easier! With our standard OneViews, we aggregate your data across platforms and provide analysis-ready dashboards powered by ChannelMix AI that predict optimal performance and help you pace to your goals.
Visit our Help Center to learn more about our Pacing Summary Dashboard.