With a new fiscal year around the corner and marketing teams gearing up for fresh campaigns, conversations around proving the impact of spend are occurring. In this episode, Jenny breaks down the must-know basics of marketing measurement to make sure your campaigns show real results. She dives into why having a solid measurement plan matters, the key differences between dashboards and reports, and how data lakes and attribution modeling give you a complete view of your marketing performance. While visualization tools are useful, the real value comes from how you structure and analyze your data.
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today, I’m excited to chat with you about measuring marketing’s efficiency. The beginning of each new fiscal year, as we’re super excited to begin rolling out new budgets, new campaign strategies, perhaps promoting new service lines or new locations.
Conversation always comes back to, how are we going to prove the efficacy of the spend itself. And so even though we’re excited about new campaigns or tactics, at the end of the day, everything needs to flow back to the accuracy of your measurement strategy. So I wanted to do an episode on that today. So as you’re putting all of these new pieces in place, you remember the thing that is going to make you look good to your leadership team halfway through the year.
You know, as you need to go and give them a report, making sure that you had all of the right components and pieces in place to be able to talk about how great your campaigns are going with numbers and data that they actually care about. So we’re going to talk about a couple of key things. The first is a measurement plan.
A lot of folks revisited and created, perhaps for the first time for their organization, a measurement plan when they were going through all of the privacy cleanup processes over the last couple of years. A lot of organizations changed the analytics tool they were using, perhaps implemented a layer like server-side Google Tag Manager or a CDP, and that resulted in them needing to re-ask themselves, what are we measuring on the website, and how are we going to report on it?
If you have not yet done that, I would strongly encourage you to sit down and make sure that you have a measurement plan in place for your marketing activities. This should be everything from what actions on our website matter that we need to report on. To how are we going to tag and differentiate between all of our different campaigns and tactics as we’re pulling dashboards and reports together?
So it will be first start at a high level, you know, what’s the story we need to tell them? What data do we need to support that story. And then as you’re working on the measurement plan and will get more and more granular as you get into the details of each individual campaign, each tactic that you’re rolling out.
And you should really be pretty in the weeds, even developing custom UTM parameters as part of this measurement plan. Some of the questions that you’ll want to ask yourself as you’re finalizing your measurement plan and rolling into the implementation stage is, are we going to work with a report or a dashboard? And so I wanted to first make sure that I explained the difference, because these words are often used interchangeably, but they have very different meanings.
A dashboard is a real-time tool that allows you to see how things are operating and functioning, so you can go and real time. It will tell you, what you’ve spent on campaigns, the traffic to your site, the number of forms that have been submitted, the number of phone calls that have been made by prospective patients.
It should really enable you to drill down and understand your metrics in a real-time basis. So at any point throughout the month, if you need to communicate, on performance to your agency or to your internal team, you should be able to pull your dashboard up and see exactly how things are progressing. A report, on the other hand, is really a snapshot in time.
So for example, at Hedy & Hopp, our clients have a real-time dashboard. They can see the performance of campaigns, real-time. But at the end of every month we create a report that is the story behind the data. So why did we see a big jump in conversions on these few days? Or why did we see a dip in organic traffic on these few days?
It really is the story behind what happened and what the business impact was. It also sometimes will have next steps or optimization or, mitigation notes as far as how we’re going to get the campaign, back on track. Or, you know, what we’re going to do to continue improving the performance of the campaign. So typically with a measurement plan, you’ll want to work on creating a dashboard.
Now a dashboard, there’s lots of different tools you can use for a dashboard. I’m sure you’ve heard of some such as Looker and Domo. Some folks even use it some tools called like Agency Analytics, where you can basically just plug in data feeds from third-party tools like Google Ads and Meta and Google Analytics, and everything’s displayed kind of side by side.
The biggest problem or the biggest mistake that we see folks making is thinking they can pay for, say, a Domo, and that will solve all of their measurement and reporting issues. All these tools are as a overlay to your data that allows you to make it easily accessible and pretty, right? It’s not going to do any of the data organization.
It’s not going to do you know, any of the measurement planning or, you know, breaking data down in the way that you need to report upon it? Let’s say location, service, line, date, etc.. All it’s going to do is give you a tool to be able to plug things up and make that happen. So if you have for your upcoming budget that you’re wanting to invest in a data visualization tool, please make sure that you understand that’s all it is.
Data visualization. All of the hard lifting work behind the scenes still needs to happen in order for that new tool to be a success. And then the last thing that I want to talk about is, making sure that as you’re thinking about your measurement plan and your dashboard, let’s understand the difference between simply taking a data point and sharing it in a new place versus doing some real-time calculations and normalization of data to be able to tell the complete patient or customer story.
So if you upgrade, use something like a data lake or a data warehouse that will allow you to pull data from multiple sources in. Say your website, Google ads, Meta, programmatic partners, etc. and you can create an identifier to be able to string together multiple data points to really complete that user journey and tell the full story about what happened.
This requires quite a bit of data engineering on the back end but is absolutely possible. And something that you should strive for. It will give you by far the most complete story of how your patients and prospective patients are interacting with your site and where your marketing is working. It’ll also allow you to do more advanced stuff like, like multi-step attribution tracking, or attribution modeling to be able to understand if somebody, touched multiple marketing messages of yours, you know, what was what really worked within that process, and what had the impact.
Because sometimes more upstream, models like billboards or radio or out of home, maybe, you know, you’re aren’t able to directly tie conversions too. But if you go into, some attribution modeling, then you can actually begin trying to give it credit whenever it does have an impact on that conversion cycle. So hopefully this gave you some things to think about.
Again, always start with a measurement plan. That’s always step number one. Make sure that you have a clear vision of what story you’re wanting the data to tell and what you want to report on, and then decide upon the tools and the process for getting organized upfront, especially as you’re going through strategic planning and figuring out what you want to accomplish for the year.
Making sure that your measurement plan layers on top of that so you have the data at your fingertips to report on. It is super important. Thank you for tuning in today. Have a fabulous rest of your day, and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
