As marketers, our job is to educate the market to drive two fundamental things: increased brand awareness and/or sales. We create and promote content in a variety of formats to do this, such as articles, datasheets, ads, tradeshows and more. You could put out the best content, but without metrics it’s hard to determine if you’ve met your goal.

Simply collecting data isn’t enough, though it is the first step to analyzing performance. Your goals will determine which data is most important, and thus bump certain metrics to the top of your priority list. Knowing which data points are Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is the next step in determining Return on Investment (ROI). You may have heard marketers say “data, KPI, and ROI” interchangeably, but knowing the differences between them will help you understand the analysis process better.

Collecting Raw Data

Collecting data provides the first level of insights on your marketing performance.. A great tool to collect data is Google Analytics. Through this site, you can pull and prioritize information to improve digital strategies. However, not all marketing tactics are digital or pulled into Google Analytics, so some information might need to come from other sources- your sales team, event team, external advertising platforms, email platform, etc.

This ‘raw data’ is all the various insights you can learn about your marketing performance. It can be extraordinarily helpful, yet overwhelming. This is when your marketing or business goals will come into play and help you narrow your focus from the full amount of raw data into KPI data.

Determine the KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are data points that are directly aligned with measuring your goals. This narrower set of data focuses solely on the metrics that will help you decide if your marketing ‘works’. To decide which data points are KPIs, match your goal to a tangible action and find the metric in the raw data that measures that action. This is different for every company, every campaign, every tactic. Misaligned goals and KPIs can disrupt progress, so take the time to truly dive into this process.

[At this point, KPIs are still just numbers. Finding the right way to collect and report on those KPIs impacts your job as a marketer very highly as well. Some actions are easy to track, while others are more elusive. Make sure your goals have a measurable outcome or you’re just going to spin in circles looking for performance data that doesn’t exist.]

Analyzing and Optimizing Marketing Strategy

Now it’s time to analyze your KPIs to determine return on investment (ROI). With this analysis, you can identify whether you’re earning more than what was spent, if you met your initial goal and if there’s room for improvement. If you’re not hitting your goal or spending more than you’re earning, it’s crucial to identify the problematic area before starting or continuing your marketing tactics.

Analysis is what makes ROI different than KPIs, and the final step in this process. This analysis can take many forms: specific calculations for cost per lead vs sales revenue or simpler numbers to identify things like trend patterns in web traffic. Are there certain factors to filter into your analysis? Time of year, budget constraints, other variables outside your control…like a global pandemic, perhaps?

Either way, analysis goes beyond the data. Did the raw data and KPIs meet your goal is the first part, followed by what implications that has on your marketing strategy. “Is your performance improving” is not the final goal of determining ROI. Rather, think of it as “What can I do now to continue to improve?”

Examples of an Aligned Measurement Strategy

Goal: Increase thought leadership

Tactic/Data: Webinar

KPI: Attendee contact data

Analysis: Thought leadership is an abstract goal, but finding a tangible data point to measure can help define performance. If you want people to look to your company as a thought leader, then you first need people to hear your message. One potential tactic is presenting a webinar. The KPI is number of webinar attendees who provide contact data. Determining if this tactic is successful could include examining the number of attendees to your webinar compared to previous webinars you hosted, or data from industry-average tactics.

Impact on Strategy: Based on the KPI analysis, how can you improve for next time? Test day of the week or time of day? How was this tactic promoted- could you increase the number of reminder emails or social media posts about the event beforehand? Were there technical issues preventing the webinar from being a success, and you should look into using a different platform in the future? Did this exceed your expectations and you just want to host more webinars before making any changes?

Goal: Increase leads for new product

Tactic/Data: Email campaign

KPI: Landing page form submissions

Analysis: Leads for a new product can come from many different places. Each channel is a different KPI. In this case, if you’re sending emails on the new product, you can measure data points from multiple steps in the process – opens, clicks, time on landing page – but the true KPI is someone filling out the contact form on the landing page to get info about the product. Each data point tells part of the story, but if the goal is leads, only form submissions show that intent.

Impact on Strategy: Looking at all the data points can still be helpful for overall strategy in terms of making improvements. If you didn’t meet your form submission goal, something could be wrong with the form itself (not tracking correctly, not loading on the page), but more than likely the reason people aren’t filling out the form is before reaching the form itself. Is your contact list up to date? Is the email click rate at acceptable levels? Is the landing page user friendly? Other data points can provide more insights to help determine why your goal wasn’t met as identified by your KPI.

Next Steps

Using these data points can help you determine which aspects need improvement and which ones aren’t worth the budget so you can plan your goals and optimize your strategy. Through this process, you will maximize investment (both resources and money) and become a strategic marketing machine. This is not a one-and-done type of strategy, but rather a cyclical process to make improvements. Continued review, analysis and refinement are your friends.