Measurement Plan

Writing up a Measurement Plan is very important especially for the skeptics. As I have learnt over the years it helps explain the "WHY MEASURE" and the "HOW TO MEASURE" of measurement process for a campaign.

This document is often skipped and this causes problem like the various parties involved in the campaign launch are not on the same page. One example is: The agency and the client being on the different page in terms of campaign objectives, KPIs etc

This document ensures that all the stakeholders of the campaign (agency, brand manager, product manager, marketing team, advertising team) understand that campaign objectives, consumer flow, KPIs, reporting needs, dashboard structure and the reporting frequencies.

What constitutes the plan:

1. Campaign Overview
2. Consumer Flow
3. Tracking mechanisms like DART tags, Webtrends tags, Google Analytics, Omniture Tags, Hitbox tags, email vendor tracking etc
4. Diagnostic Metrics - example: CTR, Interaction Rate, Email open rate, Email click rate, Phone answer rate
5. Success Metrics - example: ROAS, ROI, Conversion Rate
6. Dashboard - showing the key metrics help to understand the performance of the campaign. Data representation is an very important part the process. I will be providing some illustrations soon.
7. Reporting Frequencies

Happy Measuring....

Why & How Measure?

The first thought to everyone's mind is why do we need to measure? Well, so I guess a very simple answer is that - you measure so that you know what you got out of your marketing campaign or marketing dollars. If you are a brand manager, you need to justify that spend. If one spends $1 MM what do you get out of it?

You cannot quantify everything in terms of ROI i.e. how much revenue did we generate by spending $X. There are many other ways to measure marketing:

1. Brand - How many more people know about my brand i.e. did the awareness of my brand increase? One can measure this by conducting surveys for example using Dynamic Logic.
2. Increasing visits to your website is an indicator that your marketing dollars are paying off.
3. Increased unique visitors, time spend on the website are some other metrics which can be used

Many a times as an advertiser, one needs to justify why does he/she needs that $10MM budget. OR what we also call as Business case.

Sometimes one needs justify in terms on "$" value that spending $10MM would help the business's bottom line by $20MM. Based on each business model, there are different ways how this can be done.

The simplest and easiest way is to use a ROI model i.e. Revenue/Spend to get the amount of revenue generated per $1 spent in marketing.

If ROI is not the measure, which is actually not possible in a lot of cases where there is no e-commerce platform, there need to be other ways to create business models. For example: If there is a action that an advertiser wants the consumers to take - it would be a good idea to attribute a "$" value to that action. This action could be "find a store" or "contact us". So, if you know that for every find a store, a consumer would make a $100 purchase, you can attribute revenue to each "find a store" and thus be able to work on your business case.