When Tracking KPIs, Beware Analysis Paralysis - VantagePoint

When Tracking KPIs, Beware Analysis Paralysis

CTR, A/B, SERPs, CPM, CPC, YOY — we throw around these acronyms on a daily basis while monitoring campaign performances. Sometimes the shorthand makes it easy to become numb reading measurement reports that determine how your marketing efforts are impacting your ROI (sorry, did it again).

When sharing your reports, be sure to watch out for analysis paralysis. Decision makers need something they can understand: less data, more clarity.

At VantagePoint, we track how each marketing activity is performing on a regular basis and cascade that into monthly and quarterly reports. More sophisticated dashboards are also available to provide real-time access to track performance and justify marketing spend, but at the end of the day we strive to provide useful analysis with real words and real improvement suggestions.

Our ultimate goal is to route marketing qualified leads to your sales force by tracing buyer behavior, learning which marketing elements were most successful in getting the desired behavior and then repeating those successes.

For our digital properties — website, emails, paid search, social media — we can provide full visibility across each activity to determine how to course correct or continue to make an impact. Whether it’s optimizing our emails through A/B testing of subject lines and soft/hard offers or monitoring Google Analytics to determine where traffic is coming from and getting the highest conversion rates, VantagePoint can provide real-time reporting and observations to help make better, data-driven decisions in the future.

Here are three tips to avoid the mind-numbing aftermath:

  1. Determine what to measure upfront – You can’t measure success unless you establish goals and key metrics that align to your marketing strategy.
  2. Connect the dots of marketing activity – Track the level of engagement throughout the buyer journey.
  3. Turn over marketing qualified leads to sales – Don’t delay in providing regular lead reports to sales reps consisting of online conversions and funneled prospects.

Be sure to keep track of how your current initiatives have performed, how you plan to optimize your investment and how you’ll make an impact based on your established KPIs (“key performance indicators” and our final acronym).