Data. We’re drowning in it. There are so many metrics to prove marketing’s effectiveness, and it’s tempting to throw all of them into a thick report to show the science behind what we do.
But if you want to move away from showing how successful you are at measuring to how effective you are at marketing, here’s a short guide to picking the right metrics for the right job and the right audience.
The first cut is easy – decide if the report is for the board or your marketing team. If it’s for the board, the report is strategic and will therefore have three areas of focus:
1. The overall impact of marketing on the business
2. How marketing has built the brand
3. How marketing has generated business
These metrics are important for the marketing team too.
They form the benchmarks for how effective their activity is, periodically. But the marketing team will also generate more frequent tactical reports detailing the effectiveness of all the possible levers they can pull across the customer journey.
These can include reach, frequency, impressions, clicks, cost per click, downloads, opens, likes and shares. They’ll also include conversion rates for landing pages, websites and nurturing campaigns.These are the areas the team will seek to optimise day-to-day in order to impact the strategic KPIs. This level of detail isn’t relevant for the board.
In this article, we’re going to focus on the strategic report for the board, leaving the tactical stuff for another time.
Before we start, we assume that you have the necessary tracking in place to know the source of your prospects, with the ability to follow that tracking through to your CRM and measure what kind of customers they become.
If not, we have a future article planned to help you out, so stay tuned for that.
Once you’ve got your tracking in place, attributing customers to marketing is relatively simple to achieve for your direct response activity, but harder to quantify for brand building.
We’ll offer some simple solutions to this problem for you later on.
Report section 1: marketing’s business impact
Growth
For most B2B businesses who have long sales journeys, this will include booked revenue and pipeline value that is attributable to marketing within the period of the report. It will include revenue from new customers and existing customers where CRM activity has generated the business. It may also show growth in the number of customers and be broken down by segments of strategic focus such as industry and geography. To show growth trends you may choose to show figures for the current quarter as well as year-to-date and year-on-year data.
Profitability
This section of the report mirrors the revenue growth format, but shows the profit generated from the sales attributable to marketing. This is an important metric, showing the quality of customers vs. the volume shown in the revenue growth.
Average lifetime value
This requires a little more heavy lifting in your CRM data, but it’s worth it, as any increases in the rolling average will give a top-line view of how successful you are at generating repeat business.
Market share growth
This is relatively easy to calculate. First, find the annual spend in the category and location in which you operate – most sectors have analyst reports which will give you this figure. Then, express your annual revenue as a percentage of that number. If you’re midway down a crowded market, you might choose to show a share of market relative to your top ten competitors, taking the revenue figures from their annual reports.
Loyalty
Another easy metric to provide from your CRM is loyalty. First, select the customers who have bought something from you in the last 12 months (this time frame could be longer, depending on the length of your sales cycles).
These are active customers as opposed to dormant ones who may or may not be loyal to you.
From this pool you’ll select those who have been with you for over a year – any who have been with you for less time are considered new and won’t have a long enough trading history to demonstrate true loyalty.
From this pool you can show the average, longest and shortest length of relationship. Ideally, all three of these will increase year on year.
Report section 2: brand building
Let’s face it, unless you’re a major B2B corporation, most of us won’t have the budget to commission any form of brand research. There are, however, some simple and effective ways to measure your brand’s impact and growth which we’ll share here.
Awareness
One of the simplest ways to track growth in your brand awareness over time is to measure the direct traffic to your website. This figure shows the volume of visitors to your website who typed the address directly into their browser (if they did this, they were looking specifically for you and are therefore aware of your brand name).
To supplement this view, you could use GoogleAds’ Keyword Planner and GoogleTrends to measure the volume of searches for your brand name. This works if you have a distinctive brand name but would be less useful for generic brand names like Shell or Seat.
Finally, you could use social listening tools to track the volumes of brand mentions outside of @mentions and the official, owned channels.
Correlating these three measures against your brand building activity will provide a good picture of its effect on brand awareness.
BUT – and this is an important but – expectations around this data must be carefully managed through an understanding of the time scales involved in brand building.
If, say, you’ve launched a brand campaign across a number of channels, you will have planned for it to play out over at least five to six months. If the board is looking for results to show in the first few months, they’ll be disappointed, as any noticeable growth will only start to show towards the end of the five-to-six-month period. It’s important they understand that brand building is a long-term, consistent investment in growth, but over time there turns have a deeper, longer-lasting impact than the short-term direct response activity.
That’s it for the first part of this article. Next, we’ll dig deeper into further brand metrics and the essential strategic measures for your direct response and lead generation reports, so stay tuned.
If you need help with anything we’ve touched on in this article, why not reach out to us at [email protected]?
Google Data Studio is a brilliant tool that helps you visualise your data with customisable dashboards and reports. We first added to our repertoire of tools back in 2016 when Google introduced it as part of the Google Analytics 360 suite, and it’s been a firm favourite ever since.
It’s one of our most useful day-to-day tools, not only for supporting our own accounts management, but also for our client reporting. So without further ado, here’s 7 reasons why you should dive into Data Studio if you’re running paid media ads.
Spend a lot of time checking dull spreadsheets? It’s time for an upgrade! One of the key benefits of Data Studio is that it’s a highly visual analysis tool, enabling your data to easily be displayed via different charts, graphs, and tables at the click of a button.
For each element, you can choose which trends to highlight, how much information to include (e.g. ad image previews or just ad names) and which parts to make interactive in order to have the most visual impact.
Data Studio dashboards are fully customisable in every respect, meaning you can add company logos, colour schemes, and brand fonts to make your reporting a little more fun! If you’re a visual learner, the numbers are likely to make a lot more sense now too.
Most of our ambitious advertisers run campaigns across many different platforms at any one time, with each one likely having its own associated budgets, benchmarks and targets.
Data Studio has an incredible 500+ (and counting!) data source connectors so it’s the perfect place for all of your data from different places to be easily combined. You can pull in your latest engagement results from Facebook and Instagram, your average Google Analytics goal completion rate, and your company forecast spreadsheet to analyse your top-level performance at a glance throughout the month, or simply display everything you’ve got running alongside each other. Whatever you want!
Data Studio can be used for simple reporting tasks, but it also has powerful analysis capabilities. This is where calculated fields come in: you can manipulate the data to directly suit your needs.
Calculated fields can extend and transform your data by allowing you to apply calculations to create new metrics and dimensions. With calculated fields, you can answer questions that existing dimensions cannot answer. For example, whether you’re outpacing your monthly budget, or the average time on site for groups of custom geographic regions – super handy stuff.
It’s highly likely you and your team members will have different requirements for your data. You may want to simply check on how much that new Pinterest campaign is spending this month to date, whereas your colleague may want an in-depth overview of performance over the last quarter compared to the previous year.
This is no problem at all. Data Studio is easily shareable via a URL that can be opened on any browser, operating system or device. Once email access has been granted, it can also be set up to allow different users to easily flick between the views and date ranges they need to see – either at the entire report level or individual graph/table/chart level.
If attribution isn’t a consideration, Google Analytics dashboards can provide a useful starting point for data visualisation, but one of the key setbacks is that there are limits on the amount of widgets and properties you can use. So you can only have 12 graph/table/charts per dashboard and no more than 20 dashboards per property.
That may sound like a lot, but in practice this would be 2.5 each for your main source/medium paths, assuming you are only running on three advertising platforms; (all traffic), Google/organic, Bing/organic, direct/none, ‘email provider’/email, Google/cpc, Facebook/cpc, Bing/cpc.
Unlike Google Analytics, Google Data Studio has no limitations at all! So if you’ve got a lot of different data points that you need to keep track of, then Data Studio becomes your best bet.
If Data Studio seems like just one more thing you need to remember to check each day, week, or month, then scheduled exports might help reduce the load.
Data Studio can send a PDF report automatically on a regular basis via email, to up to 50 recipients, along with a customisable email message and link to the live dashboard. These dashboards can also handily be embedded into websites via iframe, as well as being fully integrated with work management platforms, such as Monday.com, to ensure your data is always close to hand when you need it.
Google Data Studio packs in a ton of useful functionality – especially for a free tool! So if you’re drowning in data and unable to see the wood for the trees, we’d highly recommend getting started with some dashboards today.
Need help getting set up on Data Studio? Contact us today and we can get your business running with reports and dashboards in no time.
Cerba Research, one of the world’s leading central, specialty and diagnostic laboratory services companies, have appointed AgencyUK to support their marketing communications effort from 2022. The appointment follows a competitive pitch that involved a number of agencies from around the world.
Cerba Research is owned by Cerba HealthCare,a €630m company and France’s national health service laboratory provider. The French group has grown on the five continents and draws on 50 years of expertise in clinical pathology to better assess the risk of diseases development, detect and diagnose diseases earlier and optimize the effectiveness of personalized medicine. Cerba Research plays a key role in this ambition to scale further as they become one of the world’s leading laboratory services companies as the industry moves ever closer to the human designer medicine model for drug discovery and development programmes.
Cerba Research has been operating for 35 years, with a global network of 450 clinical laboratories anchored in seven centres across the globe including in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific regions.
Cerba Research’s expertise and track record them an attractive partner for government agencies and non-government organizations as well as pharma and biotech companies thriving to change the shape of their clinical development.
“We are delighted to be working with Cerba Research during an exciting period of growth. As they continue to scale we will help them with their brand strategy, the rollout of their marketing communications, their employer brand as well as their digital capabilities, through web, mobile app and CRM platforms. We have unique experience in the healthcare sector that has led to us doubling our pharmaceutical portfolio since 2020, and Cerba Research is another significant addition” says Sammy Mansourpour, MD AgencyUK.
“We were looking for an experienced partner that brought both creativity and technical capability and we found this in AgencyUK. They have a good reputation in the healthcare sector and have previously delivered many of the vital components needed when a company like Cerba Research is in fast growth. Their insight and guidance so far haves already started to help us shape our future strategy and we’re excited for this to continue” says Sofie Vandevyver,, Head of Business Operations and Marketing, Cerba Research.
AgencyUK has already appointed Amy Boundy as Head of Strategy previously of VML London to help lead the account. Amy joins the team bringing her experience of working with pharmaceutical and biotech organizations as well as managing clinical trial programmes for the NHS.
Amy works closely with the NIHR team to increase the numbers of research projects taking place in Primary Care.. Studies include those focused on treatments for Covid-19 in the Community, such as the Principle and Panoramic platform trials and chronic conditions such as coronary heart disease and diabetes.
“I’m fascinated by the work many biotech companies do in their search for the next therapeutic drug discovery, and this has been my passion when working for agencies and pharmaceutical companies directly. AgencyUK has a unique proposition, with a fast growing healthcare portfolio and an enviable list of global brands. I’m looking forward to joining the team and embarking on the next chapter with Cerba Research” Amy Boundy, Head of Healthcare Strategy, AgencyUK.
Specialist CRM agency Flourish has strengthened its commitment to putting the customer experience at the heart of everything it does with the appointment of former TSB and Bank of Ireland marketing head Emma Stacey as a non-executive director.
The move follows a recent management restructure at Flourish that has seen Ian Reeves appointed Managing Director. The new senior management team will maintain Flourish’s pragmatic approach to CRM, whilst expanding the use of data available through search and social to continually improve the relevance of customer led journeys.
Stacey will advise Flourish as the team look to consolidate their position and move into the next stage of their growth plan. Flourish will draw on Stacey’s vast experience, gained in the financial sector, of putting customers at the centre of every marketing experience, whilst achieving financial objectives.
Managing Director Ian Reeves said: “I am absolutely delighted to welcome Emma to the Flourish family. Our whole team and our clients will benefit from Emma’s wealth of knowledge. The ‘money confidence’ TSB campaign demonstrated the importance of data driven communications, something Flourish champion with all of our clients and I’m looking forward to Emma helping us as we onboard new clients in the future.”
Ever feel like normal marketing advice doesn’t apply to you because you’re marketing something that’s not very… sexy?
It’s easy when you’re selling very technical products to feel like a lot of standard marketing advice doesn’t really fit your remit.
If this sounds familiar, you should come along to the Business as Unusual Webinar this month with the fantastic Andi Jarvis. He’s going to teach us how to write copy that converts the personas that you’re targeting.
Like every Business as Unusual, you’ll have a chance to ask any questions you’ve got for Andi in the Q&A at the end.
Date: 17th February 2022
Time: 3pm – 4pm
Location: Zoom
Register here: mnky.bz/bau
Has 2022 got you thinking about investing in some valuable training for your team? Maybe there were some SEO challenges that were brought to light in 2021, and this time you want to be equipped with the knowledge and technical know-how to make informed decisions when it comes to SEO.
To support you and your team, we are offering a series of workshops, dedicated to the fundamentals of search marketing involving Technical SEO, Google Ads, and Google Analytics. All of our workshops are aimed at beginners to help them gain more knowledge and confidence to drive their business to perform better online.
As much as we prefer hosting our training courses in person, we have to put the safety of the participants and our team first, so for now we are providing them via video conference. Our hope is that, as 2022 progresses our workshops may be able to be moved to our lovely office in the picturesque Bradford-on-Avon.
Our Technical SEO workshop aims to provide you with an understanding of the fundamental search engine optimisation elements needed to improve the performance of your website on Google and other search engines.
Our resident SEO professionals will be on hand to debunk common technical SEO myths and give you practical examples that you can apply directly to the session.
2022 Dates: Thurs 21st April | Thurs 21st July | Thurs 20th October
The Introduction to Google Ads workshop is run in partnership with our sister company, AdPilot. This training course aims to provide you with the know-how needed to research, build and manage a structured Google Ads account, as well as hints and tips that you can implement into your own Ad campaigns.
Google Ads and paid search marketing can be difficult to understand without the right guidance, so let our paid search experts break it down into easily manageable sections.
2022 Dates: Thurs 17th February | Thurs 19th May | Thurs 18th August | Thurs 17th November
Our Google Analytics training workshop will provide you with the knowledge you will need to set-up and manage a Google Analytics account, including the most effective ways to monitor, analyse and implement the best approaches to improve the performance of your website.
As with Google Ads, Analytics can be a daunting but necessary part of your SEO strategy so is important to get the right support from experienced professionals.
2022 Dates: Thurs 17th March | Thurs 16th June | Thurs 15th September | Thurs 15th December
Our workshops are limited to 8 spaces per session, so please book soon to avoid disappointment. You can book direct through the Varn training courses page or via Eventbrite.
For further details on training and how it could benefit you and your team, in lockdown and beyond, contact our team on 01225 439960 or at [email protected]k.
Global education service provider and brand owner of TopUniversities.com, QS Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) have appointed AgencyUK as social media partner. QS is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics, and insights to the global higher education sector and famed for its university rankings, which have become the annual benchmark for universities around the world.
AgencyUK were appointed following a three-way pitch, in response to a social strategy and brand awareness brief set by the QS marketing team. AgencyUK will develop the organic social media strategy for the higher education and student communities around the world and launch a new programme of social media content off the back of it.
The pitch was overseen by Tim Edwards, Chief Marketing Officer at QS. Its purpose was to find an agency team who can support, unite, develop and promote their mission – to empower motivated people anywhere in the world to fulfil their potential through educational achievement, international mobility and career development.
The first wave of activity undertaken by AgencyUK includes strategy and creative that is based on education sector insights gathered from their world-leading independent market research and data analysis. The strategy will extend into the development of a global strategy and social media content plan rolled out in partnership with the QS global marketing team.
Tim Edwards, CMO, QS, said: “We were looking for an agency with strong strategic and creative capabilities and a track record in disrupting competitive markets. QS has grown rapidly through a combination of new product development and corporate acquisition, but we remain focussed on maintaining our market leader position, and to do so means being closer to our target audiences and continually investing in channel marketing.’’
Amy Stobie, Commercial Director, AgencyUK, said: “We are absolutely delighted to have been appointed by QS. They are a well established brand with a host of well known digital properties and a continuing ambition for growth. Our social and creative teams are well placed for reaching out to these target communities and we’re keen to get going.”
AgencyUK are an independent brand communications agency with 32 staff based in the UK. The company has demonstrated 200% growth over the pandemic period, largely attributed to the expansion of their healthcare portfolio. QS is the fifth global account win in the past 12-months.
Every January the digital marketing industry is ablaze with talk of new trends that will shake up how we do PPC. 2022 is no different.
And the pace of change is, almost unbelievably, accelerating. 2022 is set to be a big year for PPC – keeping up with Google’s new-and-improved policies, like the removal of expanded text ads (ETAs), and the world domination of TikTok can seem near impossible.
So, to help 2022 feel a little less daunting, we’ve picked the top 5 trends you need to focus on this year and how to integrate these into your PPC campaigns.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest analytics tool from Google, and it’s better equipped for the future than the previous model, Universal Analytics.
This is because GA4 has more advanced tools and reporting such as predictive insights, cross-device measurement capabilities, deeper integration with Google Ads, and more granular data controls.
Google’s plans to phase out third-party cookies by 2023 shouldn’t be news to you. In a cookieless world, it will be even harder to track consumer activity. So, in response to this, Google is offering “Enhanced Conversions“, which will improve your conversion tracking.
If you haven’t been focusing on offline conversion tracking, now is the time to do so. Most brands today run both on and offline, and some businesses forget that customers still make purchases offline.
If you just use traditional conversion tracking methods, then these offline purchases would not be linked to your online ad campaigns. Without this knowledge, you won’t be able to accurately measure the success of your campaigns.
In 2022, Google will continue to create and promote AI, so it’s vital you keep up with these changes. One of the big changes we will be touching upon in a moment is the changes to expanded text ads.
AI and automation are still quite new to the digital marketing world, but they will be at the forefront of PPC over the next few years. They are particularly useful for those of you looking to automate certain menial tasks to free up your time.
AI combined with automation can help you create impactful advertising campaigns while also improving your conversion rates. These concepts can dynamically create your ads based on user intent and website content, automating the bidding process, and automating ad success reports.
The world of PPC will experience a big change in June 2022. When June arrives, you will not be able to create or edit ETAs in the Google Ads Interface.
Google’s solution to this change is responsive search ads (RSAs) and dynamic search ads (DSAs). These will become Google’s default search ad type.
The role of machine learning in automation is the cause of this change. And this is where Google’s RSAs and DSAs come into play. As you would expect, both these ad types rely on automation.
Google will take the reins and determine the most effective headlines and assets supplied by you. These choices will be based on an extensive amount of data collected by Google from advertisers.
June is not that far away, so you need to learn how to use RSAs and DSAs now. Once you allow automation and AI can take control, you’ll have more time to craft new ad campaigns.
When you use RSAs you are handing over a great deal of control to Google, and this can feel scary… especially if you haven’t trailed this type of ad before. So, test what works for your brand now while you still have time.
You need to provide Google with accurate information to choose the best ads for your campaign. And to do this, test and discover the data you need to run an effective ad campaign.
We’ve touched upon this lightly already, but it needs to be explored properly. One of the biggest trends for the whole of the digital marketing industry is the departure of third-party cookies.
Google is planning to ban all third-party cookies by 2023, and this is going to dramatically impact the digital advertising landscape…
Up until now, marketers have been complacent with how they collect their data, seeing as third-party cookies made the process of collecting data so easy.
The thought of advertising without third-party cookies is daunting. But you need to think of this as a great opportunity. It’s one that offers great rewards for those of you who have already been prioritizing privacy throughout your customer service strategy.
Today, first-party data has never been so valuable, and the success of your digital advertising will rest on how you obtain your own first-party data.
And you can start using first-party data as an integral part of new algorithms for Google, Facebook, and other large eCommerce platforms.
Right now, TikTok is the fastest growing social media network with more than 1 billion active users per month. And its reach will only continue to grow in 2022 and beyond.
Advertisers can’t rely on one form of advertising anymore; they need to diversify their ads. And TikTok is the perfect platform to experiment with.
The world of advertising is always changing, and you need to move with the times and adapt your strategy if you want results. In 2022, you need to look beyond paid ads and explore other avenues.
Today, influencer marketing is one of the hottest trends in marketing, and TikTok is the leading platform bringing influencers and brands together.
Organic content posted by influencers tends to be successful. For users today, videos are more engaging, and they are more likely to trust an influencer’s opinion over yours.
However, there’s more to organic marketing than just influencer marketing. Take the time to improve your Search Engine Optimisation, or explore the world of digital PR. It’s also worth diversifying your content marketing strategy and promoting user-generated content.
This year is set to change the world of PPC as we know it. So, if you want to be at the forefront of these changes, you need to start adapting your PPC strategies now.
Audience numbers are growing, and you need to innovate your offering to meet this audience’s needs. And now you have new tools to play with, you can experiment and implement new and effective strategies in 2022 and beyond.
WithinDigital is an almost monthly digital marketing podcast, featuring in-depth interviews with experts in digital advertising, SEO, social media, and everything in between.
Click here to listen and subscribe to WithinDigital on iTunes>>>
Click here to listen and subscribe to WithinDigital on Spotify >>>
In episode 10 of WithinDigital, Nick Livermore is joined by Incubeta‘s Head of Measurement Consultancy, Kate Jervis, to chat about the ‘first-party data renaissance’ of 2022.
Data is at the heart of everything we do in marketing. And first-party data has been around for a long time. So, why in 2022 are we talking about first-party data like it’s this new thing?
Together, they cover…
This podcast first appeared on the Adapt Website here >>> https://www.adaptworldwide.com/insights/2022/withindigital-episode-10-the-first-party-data-renaissance
But what appears to be a shiny new toy for some marketers has actually been the mainstay for specialist CRM agencies like Flourish for years. Since its inception in 2003 Flourish has used data to drive customer journeys that help brands to be more relevant with their messaging.
At the back of 2021 Flourish delivered a personalised end-of-year round up campaign for Twitch, the global streaming site. Over 45 million Twitch users, viewers and creators received the email campaign which was translated into 28 languages.
These uber-personalised comms didn’t simply include the customer’s name or what they just bought. We’re talking whole-email personalisation; with eight different creative variants, based on a contact’s level of platform engagement, each in-turn sharing cool and interesting personal stats based on their year with Twitch. The decision to allocate individual users to different creative variants was driven by real world data insights that identified the type of user they were, the relationship they had with Twitch and their future potential.
Every email was personalised to the recipient, reflecting their year with Twitch. Users and viewers could see the creators and channels they’d watched most, what they’d supported with subs and follows and even what their favourite emote was. Creators could see how many hours they’d streamed, how many viewers they’d picked up, how they interacted with them and who their biggest fans were.
The roundup was a big hit with recipients and saw 500K+ shares on social media. As the campaign landed Twitch saw a 67% increase in traffic to the site as users and viewers reconnected with their favourite content. So much so that there was a 971% incremental increase in the number of hours watched.
Rich James, Managing Partner at Flourish and Twitch client lead said: “We’re always striving to help Twitch be as relevant to their audience of users and viewers as possible. But we’re also conscious for the need to support the content creators that do so much to make Twitch what it is. The end-of-year campaign did both perfectly. Presenting a summary that hyped creators, helped them understand their impact and achievements, whilst viewers were given a timely reminder of everything they’ve loved on Twitch. The campaign was the perfect example of how every member of the Flourish team lives and breathes personalisation in everything they do. The project was led by the amazing Sanni Haltunnen (Senior Account Manager) and Glenn Carver (Technical Campaign Manager) with the wider support of the agency. We’re really proud of what they and the team have delivered for Twitch”
If you’d like help to take your communications beyond personalisation and into relevance, you can get in touch with Rich James. Alternatively, you can take a closer look at Flourish.
You need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More Information