Our mini series at Digital Marketing One on marketing performance measurement and accountability continues with a contribution by Tom Manning on management techniques.

Very noteworthy is the following take on measuring returns with new media:

“progressive marketers rely on ROI directed funding for traditional channels and media, and they rely on return on objectives (ROO) for non-traditional, “new territory” funding (ex. parity in search ad exposure)”, from Tom Manning’s article

I think what we have here is another reminder that returns in the short term aren’t always financial but can be strategic. Eventually, though the financial returns have to start shaping up (assuming a for-profit business) so that the initiative can be called successful.

Tom is a partner with Ninah Consulting, who specialize in quantifying and helping increase marketing effectiveness and profitable business growth. They do this with analytical rigor and by producing models that lead to actionable recommendations.

This concludes our mini series on accountability and performance measurement from following authors:

• Laura Patterson, 5 steps for better marketing accountability
• Jim Lenskold, ROI measurement
• Tom Manning, guiding digital marketing spend.

“I often describe the value of brand awareness as the equivalent of half of a $100 bill. Unless you know where to find the other half, there really is no value.”, Jim Lenskold on CustomerThink

Something rarely seen appears in Jim’s article on five key principles for improving marketing ROI within the Digital Marketing One series for CMOs.

Namely, an ROI calculator for ROI measurement. Click the image and see the “Measurement ROI” tab on this calculator by the Lenskold Group.

I have been loving how the authors in our Digital Marketing One series have packed pearls of wisdom from long years of front lines experience into tight paragraphs. Almost taking for granted the hard work that has to happen in order to follow the best practice recommendation.

Nothing comes easy.

Two gems in Jim’s article I’d like to quote. Here comes the first:

“measurements must be prioritized based on the expected improvement to effectiveness, the strategic benefit of gaining insights that can influence many marketing initiatives, and the cost.”

In other words a metrics based approach to metrics!

Here one more gem:

“Key measurements to improve digital marketing include: … Capturing incremental sales conversions and customer value to optimize the digital marketing spend. …”

Advice like this tends to be written out in long, long blog posts or entire books when us web analytics people try to write about it.

Notice the little word “incremental”. Don’t care whether you use first touch or last touch or hold out groups. But the key to useful measurement is to get to that incremental contribution. Otherwise we are just wasting time on numbers games.

Easier said than done, of course.

So Jim article’s hsa advice on five best practices.

Jim is the author of Marketing ROI and an international speaker on the topic. At his firm, Lenskold Group,  his team produces and publishes many articles and research on the topics of marketing ROI, marketing strategies and business growth strategies.

See Lenksold.com for additional free ROI measurement resources.

Marketing budgets have a chance to grow in 2011, writes Laura Patterson in her article in our Digital Marketing One series for the CMO.

But – not  to steal Laura’s punchline – but there is a catch:

Accountability!

I.e. marketers’ ability to prove the returns on the moneys spent.

So, what is meant by accountability?

Laura’s article is a great to read executive summary on that and includes 5 recommendations for getting it right.

Something that I liked especially well in her article is that Laura doesn’t equate accountability with just short term financial ROI. Instead, read how she emphasizes accountability “to the financial and strategic initiatives of the organization”.

Very well taken even if the strategic initiatives must of course in the long term also lead to financial ROI, unless we are talking about a socially oriented organization.

Laura’s article kicks of a mini series on articles about accountability in digital marketing. Her company, VisionEdge Marketing, specializes in enabling organizations to leverage data and analytics towards accountability and operations, and better marketing performance. You may have seen Laura speak at various conferences. She is also the author of three books including Metrics in Action: Creating a Performance Driven Marketing Organization (Racom, 29).

(click to see on Amazon)

See also VisionEdgeMarketing.com for free resources.

Sharp, as always, Jacques Warren commented on my previous post why maturity model people always gravitate to Spider graphs?

Wouldn’t it be easier to read bar charts?

Worth a try!

So, belowe are the three examples from the digital marketing maturity model as bar charts instead of spider diagrams.

Which to prefer, Spider or Bars?

Comparing to the spider charts from the previous post, I’d say Jacques is right on. The Spider charts look more sophisticated and interesting. But the bar charts are much easier to read.

Graph masters

Dress your charts to impress. That may sometimes mean making them look fancy, but usually probably means making them meaningful and easy to interpret.

There is nothing that “sells” analytics like good visuals.

To that point, some people are just so genius that I feel hopelessly behind to their masterminds. Case in point, see for example the following Halloween costume chart by “MB“.

Happy Halloween!

Here is a revised framework for digital marketing strategy.

Why the revision?

This fixes a number of shortcomings in the first version that I had proposed 10 days ago.

• For example, David Raab and Laura Patterson, members of the Founders Council of DigitalMarketingOne, caught a critical flaw in the earlier version. Namely, my placement of channels (e.g. Search, display, etc.) in the framework diagram was flawed. I placed them in specific locations of the customer lifecycle whereas they can play a role in many stages of the lifecycle.
• Additionally, I was in round table discussions at the eConsultancy peer summit in NYC, and it was a good reminder that many companies still haven’t made explicit what mission their digital channel has, i.e. how it should be contributing to the business.

Elements of the new strategic framework for digital marketing

Informed by overall marketing strategy

First of all, before CMOs think about using this framework they still ought to start with a higher level framework such as Doug Goldstein’s briliant work at MindOfMarketing.net. That global strategy needs to be in place so that the CMO can now drill-down to define the contribution of digital within the bigger setting.

Define Digital’s mission

Job one is to define how digital is to contribute to the business and to the customer life cycle across multiple channels.

Select your overall digital strategy

Based on your digital mission your CMO can now derive the overall approach in terms of presences that you should prioritize (e.g. mobile, Facebook, website, etc.) and their related “site types” or business models, i.e.

1. eCommerce,
2. lead gen,
3. customer service,
4. content/publishing,
5. or brand marketing.

Based on these decisions you can then derive the top five KPIs and targets that you should work towards. You can also form an initial opinion on the ad channels that suggest themselves for the audience that you wish to reach.

Interactivity

As pointed out in the last post, interactivity is what digital is really good at. So the new framework retains the prominent role for interactive marketing across the customer lifecycle. I removed the reference to channels (e.g. search, etc.) however since each channel can play a role in multiple lifecycle stages.

ROI measurement and optimization

The other strengths of digital are measurability and testing. This needs to be put to use towards continuous improvement. Using the insights marketers change their investments in the familiar cycle of continuous optimization.

Unlike the original web analytics cycle of continuous improvement however, the emphasis here is that the continuous improvement applies not just to web pages and advertising. But you want to apply it to your entire digital and interaction strategy.

Technology strategy and selection

Finally, your use of digital marketing technology should of course be determined by the digital and interactive marketing strategies that you are going after.

The previous post had concrete recommendations for proving the ROI of behavioral targeting. Several smart reader comments brought together a pretty clear picture.

However, when I was meeting with a number of experienced online bankers in Europe recently, the question that I received was more difficult to answer than just proving the ROI of targeting.

Namely, the question was whether one can expect greater ROI from testing or targeting? Whichever promises greater ROI, shouldn’t that be where you may want to start?

Thinking about it in terms of anecdotal results

Testing tends to be much more black and white in outcomes when you first begin to optimize a website. After all, no perfect website falls from the sky. At first you can get a big impact from making changes to messaging, calls-to-acton, layout, etc.

There are case studies, e.g. from Unica web analytics customers, where website conversions were improved by as much as 1900% over time with the help of continuous testing, measurement, and improvement.

Now, I have seen many great case studies of behavioral targeting online. But I haven’t seen one where a better targeted message (via email or website or ad network) drove a 1900% increase in conversions.

Should you count on a 1900% improvement from your testing efforts?

Most web marketers when they hear these great testing case studies can be very disappointed when their own testing efforts only yield a percentage point or two in improvment. That happens a lot too.

And depending on the size of your web business, a 1 percent improvement from testing can still be a highly profitable outcome.

But, it goes to show that a mere comparison of anecdotal results that other people achieved from testing vs. targeting is not going to be enough to help you decide whether you should start with one or the other.

A better way to think about it

Testing is a key competency for targeting. As the previous post suggested, you would probably have a hard time proving the value of targeting if your organization didn’t know how to do (hold-out) testing.

Likewise, reporting is a key competency for testing. If you didn’t know how to measure and report on key metrics, how could you prove which test candidate truly drove better results?

Growth path

That is why it does make sense to follow a maturity model where the organization grows from reporting to site optimization (with testing) and then targeting similar to the diagram below from one of Unica’s whitepapers.

Just don’t get stuck in the stage of reporting and testing but make sure you continue to climb up the maturity curve when the business value that you are generating in Stage 2 begins to level off.

Behavioral analysis and targeting (for interactive marketing) has helped companies who do it well push up business value beyond the plateau that they reached from testing alone (see previous post).

You might be squandering a huge opportunity if you aren’t using web analytics as a rich source of behavioral insights on individual prospects and customers.

Read the full article published on the brilliant new online-behavior site. There you’ll also see uses of Venn diagrams for behavioral analytics that are more serious than the recent fun with the nerd vs. geeks Venn diagram post.

Kudos to Daniel Waisberg for launching online-behavior.com!

Ever since the brilliant Nerd-Geek-Dork Venn diagram below started zipping all over blogs in Sept 2009, I have been waiting for genius to strike me so that I might think of ways to apply this to the analytics topic.

Sadly, genius never struck.

But here are a few Venn diagrams anyway that kind-of, sort-of make sense and contain a few useful reminders.

The Analyst vs. Change Agent Venn Diagram

A good reminder how critical both business acumen and political skills are so that analysts can be the change agents that we so much desire to be.

The Bean Counter Venn Diagram

A web / marketing analyst also needs to balance an eye towards saving money with an entrepreneurial spirit towards identifying new sources of cash. Veer off too much into one or the other direction, you might be either a bean counter or something worse.

The Segmentation to Recommendation Venn Diagram

A good reminder how critical segmentation is to analysis because static reports probably never tell a story that leads to action. Good reminder also that the true goal of analysis is to get to recommendations as Eric Peterson was pointing out in his keynote at the eMetrics Marketing Innovation Summit conference in San Jose in May.

The Business Optimization Venn Diagram

The purpose of the last one is to remind how web analytics by itself just doesn’t lead to web business optimization. It needs to be combined with customer analytics and put into context with the wider marketing history. The latter refers to preceding marketing touch points and each individuals’ responses (e.g. did or didn’t click-through on an email that they received).

Another possibility that arises at the center of this Venn diagram is interactive marketing. My colleagues and I at Unica take interactive marketing verbally, i.e. the kind of targeted marketing communications that take into account each customer’s past and current actions. That makes the combination of web analytics, customer analytics, and marketing history indispensable.

Today is another exciting day in the history of web analytics.

Or was today another step forward on the inevitable path of web analytics (as we knew it) to becoming history?

For Unica’s read of today’s news, check my post on IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics on Unica’s blog.