Welcome everyone, thanks for joining. It looks like we’ve got a critical mass of people logged in, so we’re going to get started. Today’s topic is Measurement and Analtyics, and it’s part of Brunner’s ongoing Digital innovation series.

My name is ______________. I lead the digital practice for Brunner. I’ll be co-presenting with my colleague Katie Bicknell, our director of measurement and analytics. For those of you who are new to Brunner, we’re one of the largest independent agencies in the country, and top 75 interactive firm as ranked by Advertising Age. We have offices in Washington DC and Atlanta. And Katie and I are both in our Pittsburgh headquarters today. I believe we have clients in each of our locations so I want to extend them a special welcome, thank you clients. You can never thank your clients enough. Today’s program is going to run about an hour. We encourage your participation.

If you’re following along on Twitter, use the hashtag And if you’d like to include us use the handle @brunnerworks.

There is terrific demand for measurement today. Marketers are being challenged to demonstrate return on every dollar spent, and as a result measurement is more top of mind than ever before. Here is some data from Adobe and omniture.

We hope you take 3 things away from today’s program. One is to give you a FRAMEWORK for measuring marketing performance Secondly we want to help you UNDERSTAND some of the pitfalls associated with measurement And finally, we’re going to demonstrate some of the TOOLS that are available to track performance Today we’re going to go wide, and if you are interested in a go deep session on any of the material we cover, we’ll provide our contact information again at the end of the session.

Metric: ...they quantify a trend or a dynamic of a marketing effort. Open rates. Click-throughs. Response rates. Impressions. Share of Voice. Benchmark. ...They give us a pre-campaign baseline. Awareness levels. Market share. They help us determine realistic objectives. KPI (Key performance indicators). ....They are directly aligned with corporate strategy or initiative. New Customer Acquisition. Retention. Same Store Sales % Change. KPIs tend to be lagging indicators. They tell you the results of a campaign...after the fact. KPD (Key performance drivers). ... are actionable and monitored in a timely manner. so they can be used to make course corrections during a campaign. Cost per click. Response rates. Conversion rates. There’s a difference between campaign metrics and strategic metrics

JACK WELCH—one of the more respected business leaders in modern history was MANIACAL about measurement— and Jack has a great quote where he says that too often, we measure everything and understand nothing. This is especially relevant today, particularly with digital communications, where we have access to an enormous amount of data. More than we know what to do with, really, and it’s hard to translate that into something meaningful. At GE, Welch didn’t obsess over measuring everything, rather, he focused on three things. Three strategic metrics. 3 key performance indicators. The first was Customer satisfaction = b/c if you’re improving customer satisfaction you’re sure to grow market share. The second was Employee satisfaction = because happy employees gets you productivity, pride in product quality and just overall creativity from the workforce. And the third was Cash flow = b/c cash flow—as all CEOs know-- is the key vital sign of a company Of all the data he had access to, these were the three simple metrics to guide his decisionmaking.

Marketers—much like CEOs—need data to inform decisions about how they market and where they invest. But marketers face different roadblocks. Those roadblocks, though, pretty much, fall into 3 buckets. there’s a lack of clarity – or an inability to clearly define what they’re trying to measure, and marketers often get lost in the ambiguity of the measurement process. second, there’s an inability to measure the overall brand or business impact— we’re only able to glean short-term returns—that’s why promotions are easier to measure than brand equity. or third, there’s a Lack of Data . Or worse – the data is bad. Or the worst possible scenario—you’re paying someone to interpret bad data. So, to counteract this, we typically advise clients to start with some very basic questions.

Before you kickoff any project…. , ask yourself: What’s the business goal – and more importantly– how are you quantifying that goal? How will this strategy or tactic help you achieve it What will be measured? At the campaign level and at the strategic level? How will it be measured? Is there a tool in place to track what the heck you’re doing? And finally, do benchmarks exist? – because if there’s not a benchmark, the objective isn’t measureable—this is a really important point---one that we’ll expand on in a minute.

To makes things even more complicated the media landscape is very different from where it was even a year ago. We’re no longer just focused on bought or paid media. We also need to understand the impact of EARNED MEDIA – which until recently, lived only in the domain of PR-- but is now front and center with the explosion of social media. And also OWNED MEDIA which includes owned destinations like your corporate web site, branded social properties and promotional efforts. So … you need to track all three….

And the challenge, for marketers is you’ve got multiple data sets—in some cases dozens of of data sets--- being tracked by different tools and it’s all living in a dozen different places and probably being managed by a dozen different people That—in a nutshell—is the context of where most brands are today as it relates to measurement—and it’s a big reason why most measurement programs are tough to get off the ground.

SO from Jack Welch and asking the right questions, we’re gonna biblical on everybody, because sometimes it requires the wrath of Charlton Heston and Moses to effect real change in organizations And what we’ve promised is a framework, ten tips, ten commandments for how to better measure the impact of your marketing activiies—both online and off. So here we go….

Commandmnent #1. Have clear marketing objectives. This seems so simple. Yet so often we fail to communicate objectives as part of the assignment– on the agency side and on the client side-- whether it’s research, branding, promotions, advertising, digital, social, PR, shopper marekting – be transparently clear about what you’re trying to achieve. Most agencies use project briefs to kickoff ad campaigns or other tactics. If this piece of information isn’t included on the brief, change that practice immediately. Make sure the marketing objective is clear. Once it’s clear, ensure that it’s measureable.

The goal of any marketing communication is to move people from point A to point B. In measurement, Point A is always your benchmark. And Point B refers to the objective. In order to measure, you HAVE to have a benchmark. A frame of reference. Without it, you ain’t got nothin’ to measure.

These are obectives that w..

A PRO FORMA is a tool we use to establish clear marketin objectives and benchmarks.

Here’s a quick test. How many measureable objectives can you identify on this screen? Look hard.

Commandment 6 is …

The funnel is a familiar model and a great way to articulate the path – to – purchase and it’s also a good way to organize metrics at each stage of the path.

Some data is really easy to get. Other data, the right data—is usually harder to get.

This chart we completely made up, but based on our experience, does a pretty good job of guaging how hard it is to collect information from clients. The axis is organized by degree of difficulty against expected value. Sales data—typically the most valuable—usually the hardest to get. Social media metrics on the other hand, usually really easy to get, but much less valuable. Don’t take the easy way out. Get the right data. Having the right data is essential. If you don’t have the right data it’s not with the effort. Garbage in garbage out.

Commandment # 3 is there’s no single magic number There is pressure from managmeent teams to understand markets quantitatively. Depending on what industry you’re in, you’ve got to quantify the value of products, customers, services, clients, members and distribution channels---all under various pricing and promotional scenarios.

For those concerned only with ROI, this is what that process looks like. No single metric is likely to be perfect. For this reason, we recommend that clients use a portfolio or “dashboard” of metrics. By doing so, they can look at market dynamics from different perspectives and arrive at a smarter approach. Dashboard metrics can help a brand sustain their focus on customers and markets. And they can help managers identify the strengths and weaknesses in both strategy and tactics.

Short-term: “Hard metrics” like….. This is the stuff that gets reported to you on a regular basis, right? The problem is, many marketers don’t put goals in place even in the short term. Here’s a real example of what we’re talking about.

We’re running a program now for Goody’s and BC headache powders where country music strar Trace Adkins and Racing Legend Richard Petty are trying to recruit loyal users to their teams.

And we’re tracking this stuff weekly. We’ve identifed 4 short term campaign metrics and are tracking against them. I can’t show you the real data here, but you get a sense of how this easy this is. We are interested in site visits The conversion of visitor to registrant And the number of votes cast.

We also have series of video vignettes on the site. So time spent and engagement is one we’re really interested in because we want to validate is content is good enough. The more time they spend here the more likely they are enjoying their expeirence. Set goals for yourself, even as it relates to these short term metrics.

STRATEGIC METRICS are often longer term and can be divided into performance– on one side we have brand performance—with metrics like awareness, loyalty, customer satisfaction) ON the right , there’s BUSINESS PERFORMANCE– we can measure things like new customer acquisition, retention, or increased profitability. And don’t forget about trade—particularly if you’re a CPG company—to count things like new retailers or wider distribution.

YOU NEED BOTH We use this model to explain to clients how it works together. Campaign metrics ladder up to strategic metrics. And you need both to demonstrate true performance. KPIs are directly aligned to strategic goals. But these may be lagging indicators and may only tell us whether we met goals historically. KPDs are leading indicators. They tell us how we’re doing along the way so we can course-correct.

Once you’ve got both, you need a way to collect all of that data in an efficient way. This is less about strategy and all about good housekeeping.

We talked earlier about how you’ve got data living in dozens of different places. The first step is to get the right data in the right place. And someone—that might be an administrator, a marketing coordinator, an agency, or it migt be you. But SOMEONE needs to collect all this stuff to one place.

Fusing the data sources. metrics that measure efficiency, effectiveness and payback tend to be the most meaningful. But to no one data source on it’s own delivers these kinds of metrics. It takes a comparison of marketing metrics with results metrics to gain these key insights. For example, Tracking web traffic is pretty common. But we’ve found that aligning web traffic with the marketing efforts that are designed to drive the web traffic is not so common a practice today --- and yet it’s high on the measurement importance list. So here is a brief example of how you can use a measurement tool to gain a bird’s eye view of the results of particular marketing efforts in real time – or near real time. earlier, we shared a few components of Cricket - the measurement tool Brunner has developed to help our client and agency teams track results. Now Let me share how we use Cricket to fuse together disparate data sources to connect the dots between marketing efforts and results. &lt;demo&gt;

and in addition to fusing together the data sources, it’s important to fuse measurement into each step of the strategic marketing process.

Once you’ve got everything neatly organized and funneled, your dashboard up and running and automated, you need to figure out way to talk about all this stuff with your finance team. Everything needs to get translated--- we told you this wasn’t going to be easy.

And that’s hard to do. Especially when you’re in the throes of finalizing a TV spot or creating a social media campaign/ Agency folks like myself tend to talk a lot about right brain stuff. About emotion over reason About Intuition over logic. But when it comes to demonstrating success—if all you talk about is brand performance and engagement and page views—your finance team’s heads are going to explode. Move the conversation from page visits and time spent to HOW THE MARKETING MIX is contributing to business performance, margin and financial gain. That’s how you win with measurement and this is one of the most critical steps of the process—the translation.

From left brain and right brain we move to the no brainer—commandment number 8--- rinse, reuse recycle. And this refers to any data you have from projects you may have run in the past. Or if you work for an organization that has more than one brand in the portfolio, leverage the learnings of what’s been done by your colleagues. If you don’t have benchmarking data, recycling is a good substiute for the real thing. It may not be perfect, but at least it’s something.

Commandment 9. Pressure your partners. Agencies tend to talk around measurement. Make sure you get metrics documented as part of the project’s inititation—whatever it is.

Here are a few questions we’d recommend, whether you’re working within an existing relationship or your’re kicking the tires of new partners. Most will run away in fear. If they don’t, you’ve got a good partner on your hands.

Last but not least, commandment 10. Make it part of the culture. This is easy to say and hard to do.

We encourage clients to build a virtual team. Demand that those closest to planning and executing the campaigns to be part of the M &amp; A team – those are the people who will become ambassadors for accountability Everyone within the organziation, from C-level on down should be asking these basic questions: What are we measuring, how are we going to measure it?

So there you have it. Straight from Moses.

Stay true to your course. Cross-examine the data, but don’t get tempted into the Interrogation trap . We’ve all been there: when campaign projections don’t measure up to campaign results… … so there may be pressures to modify the measurements that everyone originally agreed to Or worse, pressures to interrogate the data until it confesses up to what the interested parties want it to say. Check it once. Check it twice. Cross-examine it. But then stand firm. Sticking to your guns on short term will build credibility over the long term. Look at from perspective of consumers. People who look at data, get pressured to look at data in a certain view and are tempted to change objective to match data.

A final thought from George Harrison—who actually stole this line from Lewis Carrol in Alice in Wonderland. “ If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there .” Figure out the objective and simply measure against that.

That’s our progam for today. Hope you liked it. If you’re interested in a deeper dive please contact one of us.

We hope to have you on the line in a month for the next edition of the digital innovation series.

Kaizen (Japanese for &amp;quot;improvement&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;change for the better&amp;quot;) refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, supporting business processes, and management. It has been applied in healthcare [1] , government, banking, and many other industries. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain