Executive Summary

In an increasingly private world, how do we as marketers prove the efficacy of our campaigns? With restrictions on reporting and tracking, the result is often declining ROAS and increasing CPA, which leads to knee-jerk decisions to decrease spends which can be at the detriment to brand growth. We need to update how we view performance, judging each step along the purchase journey by the most relevant metric and using all the information available to us. Having a clear, easy-to-read marketing dashboard with tailored sections for each area of the funnel will communicate how each campaign is performing against a relevant KPI to understand the bigger picture, how campaigns work together and ultimately ease decision making. Get in touch for any more information. 

In a world that is fast-paced, impatient, and focused on the immediacy of results, we as marketers work harder than ever to prove the efficacy of our activity. We could have the cleanest structure, the most engaging ads, the most laser-pointed targeting but what is the point if we can’t effectively communicate the purpose and the results of these campaigns to the key decision-makers? We are now facing a turning point in digital marketing – we have been spoilt for years with the ability to report on direct response, now as the importance of privacy is emphasised, we are slowly but surely losing the ability to accurately report and do our activity justice.  

The knee-jerk response to seeing ROAS decline, and CPA inflate is to pull media budget, focus only on those campaigns that are generating the highest ROAS and hope the brand will continue to grow. This will result in short-term gain but a long-term decline. These campaigns are likely to be retargeting or brand search, reaching only those who are already aware of you, your customer growth will decline and eventually so will the performance of even these bottom of funnel campaigns. It’s the equivalent of seeing your football team losing and substituting all players for strikers, then wondering why you’re conceding more goals than ever. Each member of the team has a part to play, some less obvious than others, in the same vein as each type of marketing campaign has its role contributing to the overall growth of a brand. Some, like strikers, will take all the glory and generate the strongest direct response, whereas others, like the solid defender, will set the team up for success without being so closely linked to the result.  

So, what does this mean for reporting? We need to ensure that we are measuring each campaign by the right metrics. Just as we would measure a striker based on their score rate, and a goalie on their save rate because measuring them on the same skills would be counterintuitive. We’ve laid out our top metrics for each stage of the marketing funnel.