When it comes to your performance marketing strategy, planning is only half the job. The other half is adapting - measuring the impact this marketing is having on your business, gathering insights, and making continuous improvements.

This all starts with the metrics you're tracking to see how well you’re working towards the goals you’ve set. The frequency with which you take a look at these metrics will vary. Daily updates might be needed for critical information like budget spend, total acquisitions and average cost per acquisition, whereas other data like audience demographics can probably be attended to less frequently.

Now, tracking and analyzing metrics isn't easy. It takes talented people to do it effectively, and even the most capable teams will struggle to gather data and pull out useful insights without the right kind of tools backing them up. There are many, many analytics and reporting tools out there, and you’ll have to figure out which ones best suit the way your business works and what your marketing is looking to achieve. But, there are quite a few things that every worthwhile tool should be able to do for you…

First of all, it should be able to pull and consolidate data from all the channels, platforms and services you use. Why? Because otherwise, you’ll have an incomplete, fragmented view of how your campaigns are performing.

Secondly, it needs to be able to compile and present this data in a clear and useful way, allowing you to make sense of both the big picture and the finer details. It needs to be easy to navigate, and give you a variety of data visualization formats like graphs, charts and funnels that are all editable so that each user with access can create a single view of the data that's most important to them, their responsibilities and priorities.

Lastly, it should really help you to keep an eye on your specific targets and goals, tracking your progress towards them in real-time, highlighting what’s working and what’s not, and wrapping all of this up into a tidy, scheduled report that's exported at a time and frequency of your choosing.

When you're studying these reports, you’ll need to consider ‘attribution windows’. These are the defined periods of time within which you’re willing to assign credit to a touchpoint for a conversion that occurs later in a consumer’s journey. For conversions that involve bigger decisions, like someone buying a car, for example, this attribution window will naturally need to be longer to account for the significant amount of consideration and research that goes into a decision like this. Whereas, for a conversion like signing up to the email list of a multivitamin brand, the attribution window would likely span a much shorter amount of time.

Attribution windows can have a big impact on how reports are viewed. If an attribution window is fairly lengthy, pulling analytics reports that cover a short period of time might make it seem like goals aren't being met and channels aren't performing, when that’s not actually the case.

So, figure out what you think are appropriate attribution windows for your touchpoints and pull reports that provide a whole view of them. As the campaign progresses, your data will give you a better understanding of how and when conversions are made, so you’ll be able to revise your attribution windows so that they’re more appropriate.

Measuring & Optimization