Despite the growing need for data-driven decisions, many organisations are struggling to track the performance of their digital marketing campaigns along the customer journey and measure the success of their campaign. In our blog, we discuss the reasons for this challenge and provide insights into what it takes to comprehensively measure multi-channel campaign performance.

Comprehensive and data-based analysis provides deep insights into the success and return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns. It is not enough to focus solely on online sales or revenue metrics, especially when strategic goals such as increasing brand awareness are at the forefront.

By comprehensively analysing the customer journey, you can develop more effective strategies and exploit the full potential of your marketing budget. Detailed analysis of campaign data across various touchpoints such as ads, email, PPC, social media, website and CRM allows you to assess the overall effectiveness of a campaign, identify potential weaknesses and make forward-looking adjustments to marketing activities across all channels.

Measurement Framework

A precisely elaborated and specified measurement concept, also known as a measurement framework, forms the foundation for a data-based evaluation of marketing campaigns. It breaks down complex campaigns into measurable goals and metrics, enables targeted data analysis and thus supports well-founded decisions. This ultimately contributes to the efficient achievement of objectives and optimisation of your marketing efforts.

Formulate campaign goals

A successful marketing campaign starts with clear and specific goals. These serve as a guide and allow continuous monitoring and evaluation of success using appropriate KPIs. Without clear goals, measuring progress, tracking performance and objectively assessing success becomes rather difficult.

Targets focus your efforts on a specific result, be it an increase in sales, more website traffic, lead generation or increased brand awareness. At the same time, they enable the tracking of campaign results through specific and measurable metrics such as conversion rates, click-through rates or social media engagement. This data-driven approach helps to identify optimisation opportunities and adjust campaigns accordingly if necessary.

Clear target definitions also promote responsibility, motivation and teamwork and also enable efficient resource allocation by prioritising tasks and measures accordingly in order to make the best use of budget, time and resources.

Selecting the right metrics

Effective and data-based process control requires clear measurement of both results and progress. The challenge here is to define what exactly should be measured.

Metrics form the foundation for key performance indicators (KPIs) that relate to strategic or campaign-related goals. KPIs are made up of one or more metrics and provide insights into the measurement of the success of the goals set. Incorrect or incomplete metrics can significantly impair the evaluation and management of campaign performance. It is therefore crucial to use the right metrics that are related to the overarching goals and the business success achieved.

In multi-channel activities, cross-platform performance analysis is also of great importance. Without this comparability, it is difficult to judge which platforms are performing better in a particular context. A standardised understanding through clearly formulated and accessible documentation of the metrics used is essential. This ensures that all teams and stakeholders can act on the same information basis.

Determine relevant data

In the age of data-driven online marketing, many companies are faced with the challenge of extracting effectively relevant information from an extensive volume of data. It is important to distinguish meaningful data from less important data. This challenge can be exacerbated by problems such as missing data, quality deficits or data silos. Strategic alignment with the defined campaign objectives and the KPIs required for this is therefore essential in order to focus on the critical metrics. When collecting and analysing data, it is important to ensure its accuracy, comparability, high quality and consistency.

Ensure consistent taxonomy

Difficulties often arise in multi-channel campaign analyses because different marketing teams or agencies do not use standardised naming rules and tracking taxonomies, such as UTM parameters or ad naming. These individual tracking solutions lead to isolated data sources that impair the overall comparability of the data.

It is therefore important that marketing teams and agencies implement common naming conventions and tracking taxonomies. This not only ensures data consistency, but also prevents the formation of data silos that make integrated data analysis more difficult.

Tracking taxonomies and naming rules should be tailored to the company's information requirements to ensure effective cross-platform analysis.
The required data must be collected correctly and consistently so that performance data can be automated, harmonised and evaluated along the defined campaign dimensions.

Ensure website tracking

A company's website often plays a decisive role within the customer journey, especially in the consideration and conversion phases. In these phases, customers should be convinced of the offer and encouraged to take action. However, an incomplete or faulty implementation of website tracking can lead to incomplete or inaccurate data, which in turn influences the effective assessment of performance. While external channels such as social media or paid media often offer limited options in terms of data collection, a customised tracking concept on your own website usually allows greater flexibility to collect the required metrics.

By correctly and consistently tracking user behaviour on your website, relevant metrics such as purchases, conversions or interactions can be precisely recorded. In addition, the integration of marketing tags enables valuable data to be forwarded to marketing platforms, social media and display networks. This not only optimises data-driven decision-making processes, but also ensures that advertising measures are based on sound information.

Data management in campaign measurement

High-quality data is the foundation of effective analyses. Strategic data management and the automated integration of relevant data sources are therefore essential to ensure well-founded and meaningful results.

Integrate and provide data

Successful campaign analysis requires the comprehensive collection and harmonisation of data from various platforms and information sources. Especially with multi-channel campaigns, a holistic evaluation is not trivial, because in addition to understanding how each platform works and creating individual, platform-optimised content and assets, continuous monitoring of campaign performance on each individual channel is required. Due to such data silos, manual processes can quickly lead to a minimalist approach that often ignores relevant issues.

Systematic data management is recommended to address these challenges. By using specialised ETL tools (extract, transform, load) such as Adverity, Supermetrics or Fivetran, data is optimally prepared and made available for reporting or statistical analyses. The use of a data warehouse can also help to make all relevant data centrally accessible.

Systematic data management is essential for overcoming these challenges. The use of specialised ETL tools enables the efficient preparation and further processing of data for reporting and statistical analyses.

Benefit from real-time data

Many organisations tend to wait until the end of a marketing campaign before collecting relevant data and performing analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies and investments. Such an approach often results from a reliance on performance data from marketing or advertising agencies or a lack of awareness and resources for automated, real-time data provision. This turns data analysis and insight generation into a retrospective process.

The availability of real-time data enables us to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns and react quickly to developments. By connecting data sources directly to platform-side interfaces (APIs), data can be systematically collected and made available almost in real time. This approach minimises dependency on third-party providers for data delivery, accelerates performance evaluation and offers the flexibility to optimise campaigns while they are still running.

Implement multi-channel attribution

Companies use a variety of channels and platforms for their marketing campaigns. The correct allocation of online and offline conversions to the respective channels poses a challenge. In view of multiple customer interaction points, it is important to measure the specific contribution of each channel to the overall performance of the campaign.

Implementing a multi-channel attribution model that quantifies the impact of each marketing channel on campaign results enables holistic performance monitoring. This allows organisations to understand the true value of each individual customer interaction along the customer journey, rather than just focusing on the final interaction point. Such an approach deepens the understanding of customer behaviour across various touchpoints and favours targeted investments in the most effective marketing channels.

An effective tool for multi-channel attribution is a Customer Data Platform (CDP). This platform consolidates and analyses customer information from various sources in real time, creating a complete 360-degree customer profile. In addition to providing dynamic customer segments, the CDP provides detailed insights into customer preferences and interactions across all communication channels. This enables accurate conversion attribution, which ultimately supports optimised marketing strategy alignment.

Analysis & Insights

The process of optimising digital marketing campaigns ends with a detailed evaluation and assessment of the data collected, based on the specified objectives and key figures. Targeted hypotheses, optimisation measures and recommendations for action are then formulated based on the insights gained.

Standardise data visualisation

By using renowned data visualisation tools such as Tableau or Looker Studio, it is possible to convert complex data structures into accessible and understandable information. Especially for multi-channel campaigns, where there are different data sources to integrate, these tools ensure interactive, user-centric provision and visualisation of cross-platform campaign data. If these reports are configured correctly, the teams and stakeholders can access a data-based foundation without having to deal with aspects such as access controls, database authorisations or complex data collection and harmonisation processes.

Due to various relevant data sources (data silos) and the lack of centralised data management, companies often use several visualisation tools and reporting approaches. For example, data from Google Analytics is visualised using Looker Studio, while social media and newsletter information is provided as screenshots in PowerPoint and leads/CRM data via Tableau or Power BI. This fragmented approach can not only lead to significant resource expenditure during setup and maintenance, but can also cause discrepancies in the reported metrics. These inconsistencies can undermine confidence in data quality and reduce the willingness to analyse data in an overall context. To ensure coherent and reliable data interpretation, it is therefore advisable to establish both centralised data management and a standardised visualisation solution.

Choosing the right analysis approach

There are various methodological approaches for evaluating the success of marketing campaigns. One direct method is to compare the results of a campaign with predefined KPIs and industry-standard benchmark data. You could also compare several campaigns with each other, assess developments and changes over the course of long-term campaigns or use methods such as A/B tests or multivariate tests to determine the effectiveness of certain measures or channels.

For a comprehensive assessment of campaign performance, it is often advisable to use several methods simultaneously. This enables a view from different perspectives and leads to a deeper understanding of performance. The choice of the appropriate measurement method depends heavily on the specific campaign objectives, the resources available and the context and focus of the campaign.

Building data expertise

Systematic data collection is at the heart of analysing marketing campaigns. However, it is not enough to simply access complete and correct data in order to efficiently evaluate multi-channel campaigns and implement optimisation measures sustainably. It is equally important to have the necessary skills and knowledge to interpret such data, generate valuable insights and formulate action guidelines based on them.

The development and targeted promotion of data skills, known as data literacy, is therefore crucial. This includes understanding, analysing and interpreting data as well as the targeted application of the tools and technologies used.

Cooperation in interdisciplinary teams, which enables a diverse exchange of perspectives and approaches, is also of great importance. An agile exchange within these teams continuously improves the understanding of data and results in valuable insights, more effective strategies and better-founded decisions in the context of the respective campaign.

Conclusion

Measuring and evaluating the performance of digital multi-channel campaigns is a complex task that brings with it various challenges. The aspects mentioned above provide a framework for developing an effective strategy for measuring and evaluating campaigns.

Through clear objectives, appropriate metrics, effective data management, multi-channel attribution, real-time data, automation, avoidance of data silos, consistent taxonomy and precise data integration, you can ensure the best possible results when measuring your campaigns.

In this context, continuously optimising and adapting your measurement and analysis strategies is the key to success. By formulating the right questions and using the right tools, methods and processes, you can make the effectiveness of your marketing efforts measurable and sustainable.

Would you like to take the efficiency of your digital marketing campaigns to the next level? We will be happy to advise and support you in designing and implementing a sustainable and flexible strategy for measuring and analysing your multi-channel campaigns.