Clearing the Clutter on Metrics

Show me the metrics!

That appears to be the battle cry you hear more and more around offices and businesses looking to maximize the impact of their marketing dollars. Of course, who wouldn't want to see how efficiently their campaigns are working? These days the media landscape is so fractionalized, so seemingly complex yet interwoven, it's given a whole new definition to the term integrated marketing.

How do you keep up with tracking and measuring your activities, making corrections where they are needed, or increasing the spend on those channels which are hitting their mark and producing effective returns? That's where virtually every manager turns to metrics.

Today, many marketing drivers push (or pull) customers to a web site destination (it used to be an 800 number or a coupon for walk-in traffic). Let's face it, eyeballs on a web site and some sort of interaction or engagement that (eventually) leads to a sale is what counts these days. So, among the easiest ways to track that sort of traffic is through free metrics applications such as Google Analytics. Taking a step-up into more sophisticated applications you'll find a handsome array of pricey packages and services offered by specialized service providers that track the end-to-end journey of a customer from the first touchpoint to a final engagement.

All of those potentially measurable points along the sales funnel process can provide an excellent window into the effectiveness of each driver and raise red flags where there may be a choke-point for potential customers as they disengage for some reason. If you know where that point in the process is, you can zero-in and make a correction so that they move successfully to the next level and keep going smoothly.

Of course this means that you'll be receiving a lot of data. I know many managers who are overwhelmed with stats that they are spending more and more time reviewing them, trying to make intelligent decisions from piles of numbers. Which reminds me of that famous quote from Albert Einstein:

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

What he means is that just because you can affix a data point to something doesn't mean it has value in your process. Additionally, many managers actually try and force the metrics into a particular conclusion, and work hard at finding the true meaning of the statistics based on what they have.

Obviously they weren't paying attention to Albert's perspective.

I would rather determine, in advance, what statistics are important to a program's success. What are the Key Performance Indicators for each marketing initiative, by media type, and THEN determine where you want to place (or watch) your measurement tracks. What are your goals through each stage of the funnel? If you don't know what you want to accomplish, no amount of metrics will help you effectively monitor the outcomes.

Start with the end in mind. Determine the data you need to reach a successful conclusion and how you need to measure it. Is it by sales? People? Visitors? Clicks? What? Then build the chain so that each phase has the proper tags and you can observe those KPI's all along the way. Only the information you need. Only the metrics that count (based on the mission).

Creating a high-level dashboard that reflects the key data you need to make meaningful decisions will save you not only time, but provide you the actionable data you need in which to make the proper decisions, and not spend all your time deciphering those voluminous reports.

© 2010 Bob Chernet - Need assistance with your marketing initiatives? Contact him today to see how he can be of help. View all of Bob's articles at: Bob Chernet's Marketing Best Practices . Reproduction of Bob Chernet's Marketing Insights in any manner is unlawful, without the written permission of the author.