What’s the best way to measure the success of a marketing campaign that involves multiple agencies?
It’s tricky because each agency owns the data for their particular slice of the campaign. Bringing all the data together in one place, so you can assess the performance of the entire campaign, can be a time-consuming, frustrating process.
But it doesn’t have to be. Alight Analytics regularly helps agencies to produce campaign reporting quickly even when the data lives in multiple places with multiple teams.
Case in point: One of our clients was selected to work on a campaign for a national CPG brand, alongside a few other agencies who each handled display, search and social.
The CPG brand asked our client to create a single dashboard that showcased the results from each agency in one place.
Step 1: Automate Data Aggregation Across Platforms
Luckily, our client was already using ChannelMix, Alight’s marketing analytics platform.
ChannelMix automatically collects data from any marketing, media or sales platform and produces analysis-ready datasets. Those datasets are stored in an Alight-managed data warehouse.
Because the aggregation is automated, the agencies saved significant amounts of time on data management and reduced the opportunity for human errors.
Step 2: Establish Consistent Campaign Naming and Tracking
Our client also needed a way to blend the data from all the agencies’ campaigns into a holistic view of performance. That was a challenge because each of the agencies had its own rules for naming campaigns and its own tracking strategy.
Our client decided to use ChannelMix Keys, which creates a short alphanumeric string (or “key”) that can be added to a campaign during setup. So when ChannelMix collects data from each data source, it’s looking for the key, too, and using that to map campaigns across platforms, channels and agencies.
In this case, none of the other agencies had to change how they named their individual campaigns — they just needed to include the key.
In the Keys interface, a marketer can also associate a wealth of metadata to a key, including campaign budget, goals and timelines.
Step 3: Greater Performance for Everyone
Now all the campaign data is flowing into a central dashboard that rolls up performance data by campaign and allows more granular analysis by audience and region. And everybody wins because:
- The brand can more clearly see the impact of their marketing investments because the data is more focused and better organized and the reporting is delivered at speed.
- The individual agencies have an easier way to produce reporting and showcase the individual value they’re creating.
- Our client has distinguished itself by serving as the reporting lead for the project.
Creating a complete, unified view of marketing performance is critical for measuring and optimizing campaigns that involve multiple agencies. If you need help telling your campaign’s story, contact Alight today!