It’s the beginning of the month, and you’re eagerly anticipating the media report from your agency or internal analytics teams to give you a view of how your marketing performed last month. As it’s presented to you, you notice some spikes or drops in performance. You ask the analytics team what’s driving this performance, and they come back with a response that couldn’t lead you to take action. Although this scenario doesn’t always happen, it occurs enough to frustrate you with the whole process. It makes you wonder as a marketer, is there a better way to get insights that are actionable and can lead to driving my business.
Media Reporting
Reporting on media performance is not an easy sport. Between data wrangling, cleansing, analyzing, determining significance, presenting into an easy to understand output, and then presenting to multiple parties with different needs does not make it a straightforward task. Eventually, a link somewhere along the chain will be stressed and break, causing the output to lose value. Each of the links mentioned are required and can’t be avoided. So how does an analytics team reduce the stress on the links? Below are some best practices they should consider and tailor for your business needs.
1. Craft the Measurement Plan and ensure it aligns with the proper stakeholders: It should include the answers to the following:
Objectives:
- What is the campaign objective? Be as specific as possible. E.g., Raising consideration of our target by 3%, selling 5000 widgets. The analytics team should be able to forecast anticipated results within an acceptable margin of error.
- How are we going to determine campaign success? E.g., Meeting the specific campaign objective with the initial budget.
Measures:
- What is the KPI that’s connected to business outcomes that we will use to optimize our media campaign while in market?
- What else are we measuring and why?
- What benchmarks will be used and why
- What are the data gaps or limitations to consider (single channel view only, no sales data, low volume, data lead times)?
- What is the attribution approach, and why?
Learning Agenda
- Key things we are trying to learn in this campaign
- Test or experiment design (if applicable)
Reporting
- Types of reports provided with specified intents. It should be clear what the purpose of each report is. E.g. (optimization report, mid-campaign insights reports, test readout report, campaign wrap up report)
- The cadence of each report
- Primary client(s) for each report
- Reporting calendar
2. Data Integrity and Consistency
- Create a robust taxonomy and naming conventions
- Develop placement spreadsheets with concatenated placement names that are leveraging the naming conventions. The goal here is to automate, remove errors, and increase compliance
- QA to ensure that everything has been placed correctly into the media systems
- Automate the data inflows into your centralized data area
- Automate the data manipulations and outputs into the dashboards
3. Insight Development
- Insights should be actionable and timely. The analytics team must know lead times and limitations for creative development, media placement changes, landing pages, and content development. A good analytics team should be able to provide insights on end to end-user experiences as well as audience insights.
- Let the intent of the report guide your analysis and what the main clients of the report care to learn.
- For example, if it’s an optimization report, determine why something is under-performing and what the recommendation should be. These are usually very tactical recommendations that can be applied.
- If it’s a wrap-up report, showcase the key learnings executives will care about, what worked and why and what didn’t work and why, and what is the recommendation for the next campaign. E.g. We should not do _______ but rather test ______ based on these insights about ____. Or the campaign was successful based on our objective of increasing consideration 3%, driven by ___ and ____ but were hindered a bit by ______ so we should modify our creative to focus more on _______ and less of ______.
- Make it clear in the report or your presentation where insights will be provided.
4. The Deliverable (Dashboard, Report, Slides, etc.)
- Ensure that the intent of the report is clear and communicated (based on the measurement plan)
- Ensure the output is simple to understand
- Provide a clear agenda for the recipients where applicable
- Have visual cues for recipients to help them focus in certain areas
- Consider templatizing or using similar visuals that have been effective in the past to reduce the recipient having to acclimate to the content layout, particularly for reports that will be delivered more than once
- If you notice you have insufficient data to make a report insightful or actionable, inform the recipients and collectively determine if rescheduling makes sense.
- Ensure to get feedback on the deliverable and adjust your next output based on the feedback.
- Most importantly, be honest about the performance. You should disclose everything the clients need to know, including bad performance. Often clients are more interested in learning about what’s not working vs. what is meeting expectations to continue to grow and improve their marketing.
5. Analytics Impact: This is something we don’t often see people do but can provide a marketer a view into the “value” of the analytics efforts to determine future investments/strategy in that capability.
- Make sure to capture and quantify the life cycle of insights to implementation. If you recommend spending more in X, and more is spent on X, measure the incremental impact of that recommendation.
- Do this for all data-led recommendations and implementations and sum up the total incremental value that analytics provided. This calculation can provide you with the ability to start to look at the ROI of your analytics efforts.
Above are some of the best practices for marketing or media measurement. Some areas are simple to implement, while others like determining KPIs linked to business outcomes may require additional efforts. Ultimately media reporting, just like marketing is an ever-evolving space, but the thing that remains constant is that media reporting and insights need to lead to actions and arm you with learnings that you can use during the campaign or take to your next marketing initiative.
If you want to improve your media reporting and need help navigating towards success, please contact us.
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