Every marketing campaign planning starts with some excitement. Whether it’s a brand campaign, an acquisition campaign, or a communications campaign. Something is launching. The team is giddy about what is to come. The cool creatives. The channel decisions. The collaborations. The negotiations. To work with Agencies or create in-house. Not the budget though. Budget approvals are always fascinating to me. Channel investments. The offer (if there is a juicy, aggressive one), The targets. Main target versus influencers. And of course the launch itself. And on. My marketing friends and I used to joke that a campaign is like a lion, and often times, the budget meows beside it.

What typically takes a backseat or comes as an afterthought are the metrics to be tracked. And if there is one thing that experience has taught me, it is that while marketing goals are always top of the burner in planning a campaign, matching and tracking the metrics to those goals are usually an afterthought.

For example, launching a television campaign that drives customers to a company’s main website, and now months down the line, there you are trying to map the return on investment. Or launching a follower campaign on key social media account, and realizing midway into the campaign that all promotional assets online, have 4 of your social media pages – including an inactive account.

In my 9-5, I have been working to launch a Spring campaign. At the very start of planning, one of my responsibilities was to determine the metrics that matter for revenue growth i.e. customer acquisition. I started to think about the metrics that will not only deliver results for current state, and help me make a solid case for budget increase, or a different targeting in the next campaign. I also considered metrics that would help with future marketing planning – which inspired this post.

With campaign development comes a lot of planning, usually 3-4 months before the actual launch. Some longer – a year, depending on other factors like the business environment, budgets, economic conditions, etc. Sometimes, a campaign never sees the light of day. And this is not as rare as you would think. It happens when the business decides the risk of launching is greater than investments made to that point. I digress. I knew what needed to be measured – channel performance, offer performance, average buyer journey, customer demographics, audience behaviour, and most importantly, campaign optimization.

Layers of Campaign Measurement

Determining your metrics usually starts with many questions:

Business Alignment: The most important metric to report; What business goal is this supporting? Does it track well or does it need a revisit? Why this campaign? This all boils down to business alignment. If the campaign doesn’t tie to a business outcome, nothing else matters.

Channel and Execution: Metrics can range from awareness level reports like website visits, to calls, to customer engagement, to clicks. And to mid to bottom funnel metrics like considerations, campaign actions, conversions, and sales i.e. how effective is one channel for acquiring the customer types I’m looking for? Channel performance vs. funnel drop-offs. Are the variables the same across channels? What does the optimization loop look like? Channels are not equal. Measure them based on how they convert, not just reach.

Audience and Value: Why this customer? Where can I find them? Who influences them? Are they the buyer or the user? Is this product/service a necessity or a status symbol or both? What is their average lifetime value? What inspires them? What is their income? Are there other products or services I can upsell or cross-sell? Is this a one-time purchase or a recurring purchase for them? Metrics are only meaningful if tied to the right customer behaviour.

Measurement and Optimization: What is competition doing? What is their market share? What is my budget? Am I staying competitive? Measurement is not reporting. It is decision-making for the next move.

Did anything change between last period and this? Were the components/attributes similar enough to be a good measure side by side? Is the change significant if yes? Am I comparing apples to apples? Or apples to lemons? For example, most businesses have off and on season. Off season is when the products are not in high demand, especially if it’s a product that is not bought year round. While on season is where a product sees some of its highest or biggest sale. Most gadget sales are recorded during festive seasons or events like birthdays, anniversaries, Black Friday, Christmas, etc. While food, clothing, drugs, water, or household necessities are year-round. Comparing an off-season campaign to an on-season campaign would be apples to lemons.

Every marketing campaign should support revenue growth – whether it is a brand campaign, a comms campaign, a lead nurturing campaign, or a customer marketing campaign. And campaign reporting is how you justify your marketing spend to support those business growth investments. Creating a good campaign report can make a big difference in how you go-to-market or even what your next marketing budget would look like – especially if those reports help identify areas of great strategic marketing decisions.