Using analytics to drive campaign effectiveness
Image by Scott Ballew
Analytics
11.01.2010
To meet goals, marketers cannot just rely on their intuition to make decisions. Instead, they must implement best practices and tools to efficiently collect the necessary data to analyze marketing campaigns and make informed, data-driven business decisions. Campaign analysis helps marketers make short-term fixes to their marketing campaign mixes while providing insight into maximizing the lifetime value to a customer over time.
Make your marketing count
These metrics should help identify recommendations for quick and effective results, allowing the marketer to discover the most valuable campaign mix. Campaigns that provide the highest value can easily be identified, making it easier to confirm that marketing spend is being used effectively. Alternatively, underperforming campaigns can also be identified and changed or discontinued to decrease wasteful spending.
The first step is to review the attainment of goals of all of your campaigns and identify the low and high percentages relative to the rest. Once they are identified you can start optimizing your campaign to achieve better efficiency. You should first address initial recommendations, such as which combinations of creative to use (based on a combination of conversions and placement weighted by importance based on your goals and pricing). But to produce the best results, it is important to have in place a long-term process for continual optimization.
Looking at the long term
It is essential to proactively analyze results against benchmarks and goals in order to measure long-term progress. Since visitors are not static, it is important to continually optimize online campaign mixes, knowing that what worked today may not be effective one month from now. Here at Capstrat, we never stop monitoring. We constantly are updating, altering, optimizing and tweaking everything from PPC campaigns to landing pages that we’re directing traffic to.
In conclusion, whether making quick improvements to a campaign mix or performing long-term optimization, the process of campaign analysis and optimization is a critical part of an effective marketing program. By truly leveraging campaign analysis and optimization, the marketer can make both short- and long-term data-driven decisions with confidence and justify marketing campaign expenditures to customers.
