All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

How to Get the Right set ofMarketing Metrics

www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www

.bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com www .bridgei2i.com

BRIDGEi2i Guide - Marketing Analytics

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts.

- Albert Einstein

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

What this guide WILL NOT answer: “50 plus metrics every marketing executive should track”What this guide WILL answer: “How to identify the 5 key metrics that matter to you”

F (Marketing spend) = Bottom line Impact

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

2

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

Without the right marketing metrics, you are shooting in the dark. The only way to know if things are working for you or not is those metrics.

- Ian Brodie

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

3

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

Trying to make the impact without using the right metrics to track growth is like setting out on the longest circuited road trip of your life, only without a map.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

4

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

InternalAssessment

BusinessPriorities

Marketing Metrics Framework

Metrics De�nition Roadmap Development

DataAvailability

AnalyticsReadiness

CurrentMeasurement

Process

External & InternalBenchmarking

ComprehensiveView

ContextualInsights

TransparentProcess

SimplifiedAdoption

Competition Benchmarking &Industry Trends

Internal HistoricalBenchmarking

Classification intoStages

Stage 1:No Standard

Metrics

Stage 2:Basic Metrics

Stage 3:Performance

Metrics

Stage 4:Future looking

Metrics

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

5

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

InternalAssessment

BusinessPriorities

DataAvailability

AnalyticsReadiness

CurrentMeasurement

Process

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

6

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

7

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Data Silos

SeparateStakeholder

Single category

Single customer segment

Single geography

Product

Unique Data Feed

Single country

Single channel

Single campaign

Digital Ads

Unique Reports

Single ad campaign

Single business unit

Single region

TV Ads

Disparate Databases

Market opportunity view

Sales planningview

Market

Unique Database

Single lead Nurturing campaign

Single product line, Geography

Pipeline

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

8

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

You know the back-end data structuring required to make it usable for analysts

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

Integrate DisparateData Sources

Integrate DisparateData Analytics Platform

Identify DecisionMetrics to Measure

ReportingOperationalization

Internal Information

DigitalMetrics

HumanResources

MarketResearch

Media AgencyReport

Sales LeadManagement

Emails

External Information

Automatedmulti-stakeholder

Interactive Dashboards

Website Resgistrations

Visitor Count

Mobile App SocialPresence

PurchasePath

DigitalFootprint

Social Media

Lifetime Value Analysis

Conversion Analysis

Churn Analysis

Purchase Path Analysis

Visitor Flow Analysis

SEO/ SEM/ Social Tracking

Conversion Rate

Cost/lead

Visitor Increase

Increase in Downloads

Registrations

Churn Rate

Customer Lifetime Value

BusinessObjectives

StakeholderAlignment

Single Version of Truth

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

9

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

10

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

You know the back-end data structuring required to make it usable for analysis

You know the operational gaps (frequency, delivery mechanism) you need to address

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

You know the back-end data structuring required to make it usable for analysis

You know the operational gaps (frequency, delivery mechanism) you need to address

Baselines, external best practices and data sources

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

11

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

How can wemake it happen ?

What willhappen ?

Why did ithappen ?

Whathappened ?

PrescriptiveAnalytics

PredictiveAnalytics

DiagnosticAnalytics

Hindsight

Insight

Foresight

DescriptiveAnalytics

Difficulty

Value

Information

Optimization

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

12

Source: Forrester

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Descr

ipti

veD

iagn

ostic

Pred

icti

ve

Descriptive Diagnostic Predictive

Internal Maturity

Indu

stry

Matur

ity

Prescr

ipti

ve

Prescriptive

Use Basic MetricsExample metrics: # leads, response rate

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Use Basic MetricsExample metrics:

# leads, response rate

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

13

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

Descr

iptiv

eD

iagn

ostic

Pred

ictiv

e

Descriptive Diagnostic Predictive

Internal Maturity

Indu

stry

Matur

ity

Stage 1

Stage 4Stage 3Stage 2

Prescr

iptiv

e

Prescriptive

Use Basic MetricsExample metrics: # leads, response rate

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

14

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Descr

iptiv

eD

iagn

ostic

Pred

ictiv

e

Descriptive Diagnostic Predictive

Internal Maturity

Indu

stry

Matur

ity

Stage 2

Stage 1

Stage 4Stage 3

Prescr

iptiv

e

Prescriptive

Use Basic MetricsExample metrics: # leads, response rate

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

No Standard Metrics

Basic MetricsDescriptive

Business Outcome Metrics: Diagnostic

Future LookingMetrics: Predictive

& Prescriptive

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

15

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

16

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

17

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.

All marketing veterans understand the context behind these words and are aware of how pivotal a role the right set of metrics can play in translating marketing investment into real business impact.

Metrics that are simple to understand, aligned to business needs, organizationally relevant, objective, actionable and at the right level of detail become a powerful ‘story telling’ tool in the marketers’ arsenal. They come in handy during communications with CXOs in substantiating marketing performance, answering the host of ’why this happened’ and ‘what was the benefit of that’ questions, thereby bringing visibility to the full picture.

What makes a perfect metric?

• Simple to understand business impact

• Aligned to current business needs

• Numerically credible – Objective, specific, quantifiable, measures correctly what it is supposed to, organizationally relevant

• At the right level of detail – aligned to action-ability

Now that we agree we need the right metrics - let’s get to what we need, to nail them.

Being a marketer, you already are aware of all the data available to you and the plethora of metrics you currently track. Probably, the biggest challenge you face is getting to which of these metrics matter – the ‘right set’ to focus on without getting lost in the data so that you have the clarity to tell your story to the management.

The point is

• You have all the data, but do you believe you have the ‘right set’ of metrics yet? • Are these the metrics your management cares about?• Are you sure what you have is the best way to substantiate your story? • Do these metrics enable you to take the actionable decisions they were meant for?

Don’t you just wish your answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes”! Wouldn’t it be great to find a method – a guided, step by step, logical approach - to walk you through the process of identifying these ‘right metrics’ best suited for your organization?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say, you already have all the ingredients to get you on the right track.

• You have already identified most of the key metrics • You have the data coming from the various sources which will give you the ultimate timbre• You know how to use this data to calculate some of these metrics • For some others, you have an idea of the data drivers, but need to determine the exact formula to calculate them accurately• And there might be few metrics you don’t yet know you need to complete this ‘right set’

Now, how do you go from here to identifying this perfect set of metrics to be able to actionably drive all decisions and answer all your questions? How do you distil the data you have available, transforming it in a manner that will enable you correctly measure business impact and show the needle move on the bottom line?

In other words, how do you move from looking at the 50+ data points that you are tracking today – the whole host of information from website metrics to social media metrics to the uncountable number of reports you get from the various media, advertising, BTL agencies, to primary and secondary research insights that mostly lie in silos adding to the noise - to a few simple metrics that can stitch a holistic picture, quantify business impact, and drive ROI (like cost per lead, customer lifetime value)

What you need is exactly what we have for you here. We have outlined in this guide, the tried and tested framework we live and breathe every day, to guide you in nailing these metrics for your own marketing organization yourself!

P.S: We are not going to plan your road trip here, but we will surely get you the right map and give you all the tips and tricks you need to plan a perfect one for yourself!

Marketing Metrics Identification Framework

Measurement Maturity Assessment

The first step in identifying the ‘right set’ of metrics you need is to do an assessment of where you are at the moment in terms of your measurement maturity. This should be a comprehensive view looking at the inside out indicators (like business priorities, data availability, analytics readiness, current measurement process and historical benchmarking) on the one hand, and the external indicators (like competition benchmarking and industry trends) on the other.

This will give you a 360 degree understanding of what stage of measurement maturity you are in, and help you define for yourself the right set of metrics you should focus on. It will give you a clarity of vision, expose the gaps and ground you need to cover to become a data driven organization. This is all you need to define your metrics and analytics roadmap with clear milestones along the journey.

Internal Assessment

Let’s deep dive a little into what insights you need from an internal assessment perspective. Sure, you may have been in your organization for a long time and already know most of it. But even those who think they know it all often are not able to get to definitive and reliable insights. That is why it is important to go back to the drawing board to assess the maturity of your measurement process.

Business Priorities

So here it goes, starting from scratch, whiteboard and articulate clearly what the focus areas and business priorities of your organization are and the key data-driven decisions you (marketing) are expected to drive for your company. Also, assess the priorities and drivers of the other business functions you work with closely to drive these larger organization priorities (E.g., sales function). Now, using your judgment, determine the importance of these priorities so that you know the select ones you need to start focusing on immediately, and others you can park for later. This will give you definitive business objectives aligned to your organization’s vision to channel all your measurement efforts in that direction.

Once you have clearly identified business objectives, the next step is to translate these into well-defined measurement efforts - or the ideal set of metrics - that will help track the success of these objectives. Don’t worry about the data, or whether, how it’s possible to measure at this point. Assume an ideal world where it’s very easy to accurately track everything you want. For this exercise to be effective, it’s also important to step away from how you have been tracking so far and just focus on what you would want your set of ‘right metrics’ to answer in a perfect world.

Now break these metrics down into smaller pieces (sub-metrics) – in the light of what information you believe will ultimately impact (formulate/drive) these metrics. Doesn’t matter if you can’t determine these accurately at this point. What you will end up with here, are the tangible pieces of the puzzle (ideal set of metrics) you need to start solving for.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

Data Availability

Now that the top down definition of objectives is done, you need to start bottom up from the other end of the pyramid (reality of your data) and take the journey from here to realistically starting to measure the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined.

Take a hard look at the entire data ecosystem you already have.

1. Assess what shape, form, and place the data reside (data architecture) in. 2. Understand the flow (data flow diagrams), frequency and the quality of your data blocks. 3. Align organizationally on the business definitions of the various data points (data dictionaries) available in your arsenal. 1. 1. 4. Explore if there are any new data sources you may need to procure either immediately or at some later point in time in the course of your journey.

In parallel, take a look at the current metrics you track and see if they (and what combination of these) are aligned to your objectives, actionable in driving decisions, close to your ideal set of metrics. This way you can objectively construe the gaps you need to fill between what you have and where you want to get to.

So now you know the objectives to focus on

You have the ideal set of metrics (somewhat unrealistic)

You know the readily available data and current metrics

You know the gaps between ideal and present reality

Analytics Readiness

To reconcile this, it is important to assess whether or not your data is in the shape and form, ready to be used for any kind of analysis you may need to perform. Many times, even though you have all the data, it may reside across fragmented reports (from the agencies, vendors, digital dashboards). Or, it could be in multiple data silos in the organization (CRM, Sales Pipeline, Order Management System).

These fragments or silos may not talk to each other and in order to be able to use it, you may need to first connect and bring all the relevant pieces together, at the same level, preferably in one place. You will also need to look at the multiple data stakeholders (those who own or will need to consume this data) and the operational and data security challenges that come with it.

It could mean that you need to build a data warehouse (single repository for master data management), a data mart and staging area (the interim place where all your data can reside in an analytics-ready form so that you can quickly start using it to drive some decisions). It could also mean that you need to build some advanced analytics models to derive some of these metrics. Or, spend some time to first clean existing data and procure additional data.

Current Measurement Process

Lastly, you need to take a look at the operational aspect of your current measurement process. You may already have a unified automated measurement platform, or it could be done through multiple reports that may or may not all be connected. These disparate reports may not give you all the threads to weave that big picture. Eg. you may not be able to do an apples to apples comparison between the ROI of a TV ad (measured in Reach, TRP) with an event (measured in # marketing qualified leads, # of people visited).

In terms of frequency and turnaround time, few of these processes would be real-time (Digital Dashboards) while others would take days, weeks, months or more, or could even be intermittent and need based. Connect with the various consumers of this information in your organization (sales teams, business leads) to determine if the current process is ideal. If it has the right turnaround times they expect, and is seamless to their satisfaction. Once you have this understanding, you will be able to identify all the gaps in your process vs internal needs and expectations.

Once you have done a thorough internal assessment, you clearly know the gaps and cracks across all aspects and are in the best position to figure out what needs to be done to fill in these missing pieces, and which of these pieces are more important than the others.

External & Internal Benchmarking

Benchmarking is important – it’s like the mirror that tells you how good (or not) you look today. You don’t know for sure how good/bad/ugly you are unless you put it into context, either looking at it over time, or in comparison to your competitors.

You just sketched a sure and objective picture of your organization’s internal measurement maturity. This assessment will give you a comprehensive understanding of all the types of gaps you need to fill from a current inside out perspective. Now, you need to compare all of these against internal historical and external industry benchmarks.

Competition Benchmarking and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against the competition and gaining insights into the trends occurring across your industry is a very important outside in perspective to have. It gives your understanding another dimension to find out how you are doing compared to others so that you know where you rightly stand and how much ground you need to cover. It will provide you with valuable context that you can use as a yardstick to set meaningful targets and long term vision to your measurement objectives. Hence, it’s an essential ingredient to defining your set of right metrics, your roadmap as well as your baselines.

Competition benchmarking gives you insights into the best practices in the industry like what kind of data your peers are using, what kind of impact are their initiatives creating, how sophisticated are their metrics (Descriptive-diagnostic-predictive-prescriptive), and measurement platforms, what kind of business decisions are they able to drive using data.

A key aspect of external benchmarking is the light it throws on the additional data sources available and effectively being used by your competitors. Taking the cue from here you may want to evaluate these for your specific objectives. These sources can be internal or external and also can be acquired from partnerships with available vendors.

You have now covered all the ground across both internal and external dimensions. You sure have a holistic view of where you stand today vs where you need to get to.

Internal Historical Benchmarking

For internal benchmarking, you need to dig into your historical data and look at all the metrics that were being tracked, specifically any additional relevant metrics that were tracked some time back in your organization (by past employees or in other teams) but not anymore.

This unearths new insights, data sources and problems that you didn’t know existed. Also, it saves you from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and avoiding a lot of trial and error associated with trying out various measurement combinations. Not just that, it gives you historical data points you can use as baselines to compare your current performance vis-a-vis past performance.

Classification into Stages of Measurement Maturity

You would already know the 4 types of analytics Forrester defines – Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. This segregation is done based on what type of value one derives out of their measurement metrics and how difficult they are to calculate. Let’s quickly refresh it with the picture here.

You have done a thorough assessment of your measurement maturity both from an internal and external perspective. Your external benchmarking will tell you the kind of metrics that your competitors are using and internal assessment will tell you what kind of metrics you currently track. Depending on this, it now should become very easy for you to place yourself in the right block of the matrix below.

Once you know where you are placed, take the help of the zoning in the grid below to find out what stage of maturity you are in.

Let’s say, you are the organization on the map above. Most of your peers use basic backward looking descriptive metrics, but few have started using a large proportion of diagnostic business outcome metrics. Relative to this, your maturity is low since you primarily use basic diagnostic metrics, so you can classify yourself in stage 2.

Stage1: When you don’t have standard marketing metrics

When you don’t have standard metrics, you run the risk of not having any visibility into where your marketing dollar went. Your focus here should be to

• Set up a basic measurement process that can start measuring any data you have available

• Build your data ecosystem along with it

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are the metrics you can get from all the data that you have available and you can standardize in terms of business definitions and alignment. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 2.

Stage2: When you have basic metrics

In a desperate attempt to appear accountable, you tend to measure everything that can be (easily) measured — from website page views to leads to response rate. No matter how important these metrics may be for your own comfort, in all likelihood, they will not be of much worth if you don’t know what to do with them, how to use them to measure your objectives and take actionable business decisions. You need to be able to use your metrics to show your management how it impacts the bottom-line at-least in some form. So, here is what you need to do when you have only the basic metrics at your disposal.

• Use the ideal set of metrics and sub-metrics you just defined (internal assessment section above) and pick which of these you can immediately start measuring using your basic metrics or some combination of these. Prioritize these metrics so you can channelize your effort

• If you don’t already have one, build an integrated marketing data ecosystem and merge all the data silos to set up a unified measurement process.

• Take cues from the benchmarking exercise to evaluate integration of new data sources into your data ecosystem

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Once you have done that, you will then need to build a phased roadmap to stage 3 with milestones for various models you need to develop to measure the key diagnostic metrics and sub metrics in your ideal set.

Stage3: When you have business outcome metrics

If you already have most of the diagnostic business outcome metrics in place, chances are that you already have a well functional measurement process. While you have a good idea of what is happening and also insights around reasons why something happened, you still face challenges when it comes to using these metrics to enable decision making because your metrics are still backward looking. You still can’t predict what will happen on the basis of a post-mortem report. So, here is what you should be doing.

• Make an attempt to define the future looking metrics in the ideal set you already have (Identify driver analysis and Forecast opportunities, predictive models you will need)

• Build the required predictive models and algorithms

• Assess data enrichment needs and stabilize internal and external baseline benchmarks.

The ‘right metrics’ for you at this stage are all those diagnostic metrics and some future looking metrics in your ideal set that you can start measuring immediately. Plan for an update to your data ecosystem with these models and new data in a phased manner to take you to stage 4.

Stage4: When you have future looking metrics

This is the final stage where your measurement ecosystem should be near perfect. It requires top-level commitment, discipline, and investment in the right systems and tools. The journey may not be easy, but the results—in terms of impact on profits—are clearly worth it for any marketing team. Give a pat on your back, you have graduated to a stage where only the best-in-class can reach.

• Your focus now should be on targeting the newly identified pain points that have been hampering your marketing efforts

• You will need to look at optimization of your data ecosystem and measurement process/platforms

In conclusion, metrics matter. It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Choose wisely a small list of metrics over larger ones and keep a focus on the impact it can cause. While choosing the right metrics, make sure the metrics are tested on the following parameters.

• What is available Vs what is needed at what frequency• Many metrics Vs few needed to drive decisions• Tracking activity Vs tracking impact• Measuring efficiency Vs measuring effectiveness

What you put in is what you’ll get out. When you strategically invest your time and financial resources in designing your metrics using this framework, you position yourself for future success. As you continuously evolve and move up the maturity curve over time, you start enjoying the fruits of your struggle. You may not end up exactly where you thought you would when you started, but you’ll sure end up in a great place where you will be able to take most of your marketing decisions using your data.

If the metrics you are looking at aren’t useful in optimizing your strategy – stop looking at them.

-Mark Twain

This guide is designed for marketers who already know all about the data and metrics they have… but face tight spots when it comes to stitching their data silos together to weave a single version of the truth. That is, they struggle to nail the ‘right set’ of metrics to measure marketing impact they work so hard to create.

The intent of this guide is to cover the simple steps a marketer can very easily follow as a guiding framework to identify this ‘right set’ of marketing metrics he needs to focus on, in order to ascertain marketing’s impact in his organization. However, if you are looking for more depth on exactly how to accurately quantify these metrics for your organization, you should access our Marketing Analytics case studies, whitepapers and blogs... Or just call us!

For more details contact us: enquiries@bridgei2i.com | India: +91-80-67422100 | US: +1-650-666-0005

INFORMATION INSIGHT IMPACT

http://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.facebook.com/bridgei2i

http://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2ihttp://www.twitter.com/bridgei2i

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutionshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgei2i-analytics-solutions

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics www.bridgei2i.com

BRIDGEi2i provides Business Analytics Solutions to enterprises globally, enabling them to achieve accelerated business impact harnessing the power of data. These analytics services and technology solutions enable business managers to consume more meaningful information from big data, generate actionable insights from complex business problems and make data driven decisions across pan-enterprise processes to create sustainable business impact.

About BRIDGEi2i

Once you have classified yourself into one of these stages, you have your task cut out. You can now make judgment calls on what you need to focus on. You can build your long term analytics roadmap. You can prioritize and decide the immediate set of ‘right metrics’ you need to start measuring.

So let’s get to it.

Metrics Definition:

As with any business transformation, the success of your metrics depends on how well you implement it. Let’s continue with the same low to medium industry maturity as in the example above and look at how you can classify an organization based on its maturity.

18

How to Get the Right Set of Marketing Metrics

Let’s agree on the basics first - Why do we need marketing metrics?Today, more than ever before, the CXOs are holding marketing accountable for setting and achieving specific financial objectives. No wonder ‘marketing ROI’ is such an extensively used argot. Every marketer is responsible for helping organizations grow and succeed and constantly show the impact on the bottom-line. The task, while exciting, on one hand, can be truly daunting, crazy and confusing all at the same time! Possibly, every marketer finds himself spending sleepless nights, juggling multiple priorities, wondering how to “show the money”.

How to crack that magic equation that will establish business value and convince the CEO of the impact that every dollar of marketing spend creates ?

The ability to successfully demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives (in terms of incremental sales, improved customer value, greater profitability) lends credibility to further the case for marketing spend. While in theory one might think this should be pretty scientific and straight-forward in today’s world where every possible data point you can think of is available somewhere in some form – often times in practice, it can be exactly the opposite.

A marketer, more often than not would find himself looking for the needle in the haystack – sifting through mountains of information (obviously a lot of it irrelevant), searching for the right pieces of the puzzle, almost like blind men tailing the elephant, of what to measure and what not to.