By Riona Naidu

Brands are increasingly becoming data-driven, not just data-informed. This shift puts marketing and media agencies under significant pressure to demonstrate the value of their tactics to keep budgets intact. As a result, setting effective performance metrics has become the holy grail for media planners attempting to drive innovation while maintaining benchmarks.

But are we measuring what truly matters?

Today, many brands are looking to recoup some of the growth they lost over the last two and half years with reduced budgets. As a result, many marketers are focused on owning more of the customer journey, instead of just a few elements. To do this, we need to be able to accurately map out the customer journey and measure it effectively.

With so many boxes to check, measuring campaign effectiveness is becoming a science of its own. While understanding the quantitative metrics (the what) across the campaign performance is important, knowing the context behind the numbers (the why) could arguably be just as critical, if not more. Developing metrics that help brands understand the impact of the means as well as the end is critical. So, how does this reflect in the metrics we look at?

Align with strategic objectives

Understanding a brand’s campaign objective, as well as the overall brand and marketing objectives, is key to bringing the story together. The old marketing adage “Right Message, Right Place, Right Time” only rings true if all partners are heading in the same direction. Focusing on the expected outcomes allows planners to identify strategic insight requirements, determine vital indicators of success and define, where required, parts of the journey they want to test and optimize.

Develop new ways of learning

In many instances, media metrics serve two roles. First, having well-defined benchmarks provides stakeholders with an understanding of the role of each media tactic in achieving the campaign objectives. In addition, well-defined benchmarks provide learnings for marketers and their agency partners and insights on how to further engage audiences and get them to buy into the message, product, or service.

Carving out room to test a hypothesis allows teams to innovate and learn about the impact of channels. It also provides learnings on a particular media strategy on the path-to-purchase and new ways to measure the impact. For example, utilizing cross media measurement allows teams to understand the influence one channel has on another at specific points on the customer purchase path. In other measurement trials, qualitative testing monitors behavioural shifts post-campaign with target audiences.

As the industry moves forward, measuring what matters becomes about performance storytelling – bringing parts of the picture together and ensuring that the short-term goals ladder up to the long-term north star. That means focusing on the clicks and bounces and including metrics that explain why they occur.

For example, I once had a retail client with an online store. The marketing team understood where they were losing potential customers on the online path to purchase, but they were unable to  understand why it was happening. The team tried investing in more creative options and other channel mixes, but failed to see significant improvements in their performance. Once they started supplementing the data with UX studies and customer panels, they discovered that what the ads promised and what the customer experienced as they moved towards the lower part of the funnel was not consistent, leaving customers feeling as if they were dealing with two vastly different companies. By bringing all the different data points together, the strategy shifted, allowing the brand to tell a more authentic story that better aligned with its values and objectives.

Some brands look at both qualitative and quantitative metrics, but most continue to look at them in isolation. To truly appreciate the big picture and glean the insights needed to succeed, we need to step back, letting each metric work together as strokes in creating a bigger work of art. Only then will we be looking at what really matters.

Riona Naidu is group account director, strategy, at Initiative