OK – I hope you are still with me. We tackled that Cost Per Name does not tell the whole story. We’ve identified a Campaign Revenue Attribution method that makes sense for our own organization. Now, let’s knock down one of the most common myths of all.
Myth #3 – The data will provide us with a “perfect path” of events required to convert a customer. Reality Check – The Magical Dashboard DOES NOT Exist.
If this were X-Files, I would be Scully on this one. Stop your quest for a magical dashboard that unveils the perfect sequence of events, universal temperature, dash of salt required to generate predictable revenue. The reality is that the perfect path will be unique by your individual buyers.
What we can do is analyze trends from direct revenue and influenced revenue models to better understand which campaigns work better and when – and then to optimize by improving over baseline performance. This requires us to get black and white in our reporting so that trends can be identified. At the same time, getting black and white does not mean evaluating one campaign and making long-term decisions based on performance off of that one data point – context is always required.
For example, your organization invests in an expensive tradeshow but no immediate sales opportunities result from participation, does that indicate that you should cancel all tradeshows for the rest of the year? Maybe. Maybe not. What it means is that you need to evaluate that event within the context of prior tradeshow performance as well as other campaign types, to understand what was going on. Was it this particular show (i.e. attendance was poor, bad booth location, etc.)? Was it how we prepared for the show (i.e. did we forget send out the invitation to our customers with enough notice, etc.)? Or, maybe it is in exact alignment with the past 4 shows we have done and therefore the discussion becomes how much of the total marketing mix we willing to allocate for next year. Perhaps we do fewer tradeshows and better use our resources elsewhere.
Getting black and white helps you to trend and compare the data so that you can have the right discussion on which campaigns are having the greatest impact on revenue and how that affects planning moving forward.
And to conclude our series, Myth #4: Analyzing marketing ROI is not worth the effort required.
Posted in: Campaign Planning, Measurement & Reporting
[...] Tomorrow…Myth #3: The data will provide us with a “perfect path” of events required to convert a customer. [...]
Eloqua, please stop trying to claim thought leadership in this… you all have a great e-mail tool, but leave your commentary at that.
It’s frustrating for Marketers when niche vendors (CRM, e-mail, SEO, PR monitors) use broad-terms like “Marketing ROI” to show everyone how smart they are. Sorry folks. If you look at a typical marketing budget, e-mail and search are a tiny part of a budget. And the metrics you offer are – generally – one-off campaign or blast metrics, so please label them as such. No CEO or CFO wants or cares to see and hear metrics at such a low level. It’s fine for a manager to improve his or her performance, but offers little to the CMO to communicate departmental impact and budget issues. Otherwise, you create no end of headache as we have to explain why these things are not as useful as a casual reader thinks.
Thank you for your comments – you are absolutely right in that email and search are only pieces to the overall marketing budget. This blog is intended to discuss marketing effectiveness at a broader level and look at all elements that impact an organizations’ demand generation efforts. Technology is not a silver bullet for improving marketing effectiveness. That is why the authors of this blog are exploring the insights across a marketing organizations’ process, people, and all technologies that may play a role in the mix of creating demand – not just the marketing automation platform being used (i.e. Eloqua).
Different audiences do require different metrics. Low-level metrics allow the marketing manager to optimize campaign performance. The CMO and management team will benefit from understanding which campaigns are impacting time to revenue in comparison to direct prospecting or partner channel efforts. The challenge is that not enough organizations are evaluating their efforts beyond low-level metrics and therefore do not understand the context of the metrics. I encourage clients to look beyond the web visit and beyond click through to truly measure their impact on revenue. Any metric you are tracking needs to be considered within the bigger picture and not just in isolation of a single campaign.
For more information about specific metrics and how-to in the Eloqua application, please visit the Eloqua Artisan blog for Eloqua users.
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Glad you appreciated the post. Metrics always prove to generate healthy conversations. We will try to keep it interesting for you!
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