What to measure: Using metrics and dashboards to prove value
By Megan Jones
If you are a marketer and you’re not either sick of or intimidated by the term “big data,” then you happen
to be a very resilient person. Still, the phrase “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” has never been
more relevant than it is now. And so as marketers we cannot ignore the fact that data is everywhere, and
unless we’re using it to our advantage, we’re missing out on the key aspect of modern-day marketing.
In a recent Capstrat survey, we asked marketers how often they relied on data to help shape their
marketing efforts. Surprisingly, only 38 percent of respondents said they do so “constantly,” while a fifth
of respondents said they don’t use data at all. So what is stopping some marketers from using data to
develop their marketing strategies and campaigns? In my humble opinion, other than limited budgets
and resourcing, the two biggest challenges in marketing measurement are determining what needs to be
measured and presenting the data in a meaningful and easily digestible way.
Let’s tackle the first challenge.
Figuring out what needs to be measured in order to prove the success of your marketing efforts is actually
much easier than it may seem. This should be the first step to incorporating data into your campaign, and
it should happen during the early planning phase. Think about the overall objective of the campaign: Is it to
increase brand awareness? Or to increase online revenue or consumer engagement on your website?
Once you’ve determined what you want to achieve, choosing the success metrics becomes a much easier
task. If it’s a lift in brand awareness you’re after, then brand recall and brand recognition should be measured
using a pre/post or control/exposed campaign survey. If you want to increase web engagement, metrics like
revenue, conversions and interaction with key web features can be easily obtained using a web analytics tool
such as Google Analytics. If you don’t already have Google Analytics on your website, stop reading now and
create a free account. This tool offers invaluable insight into how people are engaging with your content and
which marketing channels are driving the most qualified users to your website. And there’s even a new report
that features industry-specific benchmark data so you can see how you measure against the competition for
all available web metrics.
And now for the second challenge.
Now that you know which metrics you’re going to use to prove success, the next step is figuring out how to
organize these metrics in a way that makes sense to all audiences. The best way to showcase a campaign’s
success in a succinct and easily sharable way is to use a dashboard report. Dashboard elements are like
speedometers: They organize the campaign’s key performance indicators (KPIs) in a snapshot view that is
easy to read, digest and share. They make it easy for even the most non-data-minded people to tell within
minutes just how well the campaign is performing and to use this data to make quick decisions on campaign
adjustments. The dashboard should allow the reader to visualize the data in a meaningful way that is easy to
read, focusing on trends and spotlighting performance outliers rather than clouding the reader’s perspective
with a laundry list of data points.
One of the biggest benefits that dashboard reports provide is automation. At Capstrat, report automation
allows our analysts to spend less time on data collection and organization and spend more time on data
analysis and development of actionable insights and next-step recommendations that are most important to
the success of our clients’ current and future campaigns.
Automated dashboards are offered through almost all web analytics tools and can be custom-tailored to
fit your specific data needs. If you are collecting data from multiple sources, such as a CRM system, email
service provider (ESP), marketing automation tool or even just Excel file exports from your website CMS,
you can aggregate the data into automated dashboard reports using interactive data visualization tools. Paid
tools such as Tableau, QlikView and Logi Vision feature easy data integration from many different sources,
producing fully customizable web-based dashboard reports that are completely interactive and that allow
users to modify report filters based on the specific data they need.
Once the report development is complete, dashboards require little maintenance and can be automatically
distributed to internal resources and external clients on the frequency of your choosing. Again, this frees you
to spend more time on actually analyzing the data and developing those actionable insights that maximize
your marketing budget by telling you what’s working and what needs to be adjusted. Unfortunately, such
important insights cannot be automated, but that’s where Capstrat’s team of analysts can help. We sort
through and analyze the data for you and develop insights highlighting the most relevant findings, then we
provide you with recommendations for campaign optimization.
If you need help figuring out what to measure, or you need help organizing or analyzing your data, contact
Capstrat’s Analytics team. Our analysts have the skills and tools to help you succeed in this crazy and exciting
world of data-based marketing.