No marketing department has infinite time or money. We are constantly refining our answer to the question “What is the best way to spend our time and money?” And we do that:
- When we’re building a media plan
- When we measure campaign results
- As we compare tradeoffs between campaigns
Essentially, we need a single way to:
- Normalize data across channels and campaigns to allow for comparisons
- Project ROI to determine the right mix of media and allow for tradeoffs
- Identify weaknesses in your plan, such as poor CTR from creative, to help prioritize any tactical needs
- Set goals against which you can measure and reach with course corrections during execution
We can go all of those with a marketing scorecard.
Creating a Marketing Scorecard
A marketing scorecard is a single spreadsheet that compares the potential or actual return on investment from all channels. Yours might look something like this:
A scorecard has 8 different components:
- Channel – The various campaigns broken down by channel and source. For example, banner ads are separated by site where you purchased.
- Spend – The total spent on the campaign buy
- Visits – The number of people who came to your site as a result of the campaign
- CPC – the cost per click, or visit, calculated as Spend/Visits
- Conversions – The number of orders or leads generated
- Cost-Per-Sale – Cost/Sales
- Other Conversion Metrics – Your specific business model may require other data to compare ROI
- Retailers – Average Order Value (AOV), Net Profit, ROI
- Lead Generators – Opportunities, Lead Score
- Any Additional Costs – You may want to include costs associated with running campaigns
- Agency Fees – Search agency, graphic design, landing page help, etc.
- Personnel Fees – The cost of employees managing the buys
Using a Marketing Scorecard
The marketing scorecard is a template that you can fill in with:
- Forecast Data – For each channel and source you’re evaluating, get estimates from vendors and use past data from our own analytics to estimate the spend, visits, and conversion data. This will give you a rough estimate of whether you expect the campaign to be profitable and the relative efficiency of each investment. These estimates then serve as the goals as the campaigns launch.
- Measure Campaigns – As actual data is available, you can replace your estimates with that information to see real return on investment.
- Goal vs. Actual – You can use the Scorecard to track performance vs. goal, calculate the variance and use that to make changes mid-campaign or improve the accuracy of future forecasts.
The Simplicity of a Scorecard
It’s easy to get lost in the data in marketing. A marketing scorecard is a simple tool that is easily communicated throughout the organization and simple to understand. It’s the first step in democratizing data for your company.
Related reading
How to reduce your site’s bounce rate
Bounce rate is a metric that gets a lot of press and for good reason. It often serves as a strong indicator that your website is not engaging the user, ultimately meaning that they leave a page without interacting with it. Simon Ensor offers a refresh on some key actions you can undertake to improve bounce rate for your site.
A guide to the standard reports in Google Analytics: Audience reports
We've set out to tackle the ambitious task of explaining each segment of Google Analytics and the standard reports they contain. In this instalment, we’re going to look at Audience Reports: what you can learn from them, and how you can get the most out of the data that they offer.
How to set up event tracking in Google Analytics
Event tracking is one of the most useful features in Google Analytics. With just a little bit of extra code, you can capture all kinds of information about how people behave on your site. Event tracking lets you monitor just about any action on your site that doesn’t trigger a new page to load, giving invaluable data for improving your site.
7 Google Tag Manager courses to prioritize in 2018
If you love data (and what marketing expert doesn't?), then learning Google Tag Manager should be high on your priority list this year. But getting started with GTM isn't always an intuitive process. Here are seven courses that can help you get the hang of it, and take charge of your data.
