Is improved marketing measurement your New Year’s resolution?

In the old days technology PR was measured by the weight of the clippings book, the circulation and AVE (advertising value equivalent).  The good thing about AVE is that if you get a piece in a national newspaper, the ROI is a zillion times what the client spent.  One of the many bad things about AVE is that it doesn’t tell you anything about outcome – it’s another quantitative measure and unlike circulation it is not even factual.   

AVE today can be measured by a simple test – is it advertising or PR that is driving engagement with your company? This is easy to do, even using free tools, but requires collaboration between client and agency.  It’s more difficult to do retrospectively which is why it must be a New Year’s resolution.  Broadly speaking the most straightforward form of short-term measurement is an uplift in traffic as a result of a banner ad, email campaign or media story – the deeper you dig, the more insight is available.  Longer term the easiest way to see whether marketing is working is changes in your search ranking.  Are you on page one, ideally in the top three searches that come up? To make sure this happens you need to think about keywords. 

The first thing to look at is the SEO value of your keywords. Too popular and trying to own them will be extremely difficult.  Too obscure and no-one will actually use them and unless you are Google, gaining traction for a keyword is very difficult.  There’s no point in ranking highly for a term your prospects aren’t searching for.  You then need to measure what’s happening with your keywords on Google and how well they are working for you.

PR can add value here as high authority sites (e.g. top-tier online media) will be on page one of a Google search.  Ensuring you are in stories that include your preferred keywords, ideally with a backlink is the easiest and quickest way to drive engagement with your owned content.  A messaging session with your PR agency will deliver keywords that are based on what the media are writing about as well as reflecting your business’s differentiators.

The second thing to review is consistency – Are you using the same keywords across all content? Are you driving people from earned to owned content or, at least, making it easy to find? Are you maximising your use of authoritative third-party content?

Retailer John Wanamaker said in the early 20th century that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted; the trouble is he didn’t know which half.  A hundred years on and all companies finally have the answer to which half of their marketing spend is working.   Measurement has never been easier so make it a resolution for 2016 to squeeze every last drop of insight out of the data available.