The Rise of Data as King in Advertising: How Marketing KPIs and Metrics Are Helping Brands Enhance Their Consumer Interactions

By POKKT On Jan 24, 2020

It’s been 25 years since the birth of digital advertising when a US telecom behemoth took out the now-iconic “You Will” banner ad on HotWired.com. The campaign’s enormous success triggered a revolution in the advertisement industry, changing the way brands communicate with their audiences. But with the popularity of any medium comes the over-saturation of the same. Back in 1994, AT&T’s simple advertisement registered click-through rates as high as 70%, an outstanding achievement compared to the current situation where most online ads struggle to reach the single-digits.

These days, consumers receive an overwhelming amount of messages through an ever-increasing number of channels. The quest to cut through this noise and deliver messages which resonate at an individual level has made one-to-one marketing and hyper-personalization key focus areas for innovation in the advertising industry. Brand interaction with customers is undergoing its biggest transformation since the launch of digital ads; and in this new era, data is king and it rules everything.

When planning a campaign, use deep, data-driven metrics to inform your Marketing decisions.

In an age where consumer preferences and popular trends change in the blink of an eye, the role of data is becoming increasingly important across the entire advertising value chain. The industry continues to bridge buyers and sellers, leveraging advancements in Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Process Automation. From channel and platform selection to targeting and personalization, and from effective messaging and positioning to measuring campaign effectiveness, advertisers are using data to formulate strategies and carry out effective execution.

According to Salesforce’s Digital Advertising 2020 Report, 91% of advertisers either already have or plan to adopt a data management platform by the end of the next fiscal year, even as they continue to increase the average number of integrated data sources – from 5.4 in 2018 to 6.2 in 2019 – searching for new customers and advertising effectiveness insights.

Marketing has undergone a seismic shift. In earlier days, vague, unscientific measurements were used to measure awareness and branding. Marketing today is a science: optimizations are implemented based on data-driven insights, to achieve measurable KPIs. Tracking the effectiveness of your Marketing is important, but many small and mid-sized businesses don’t know where to begin.

What performance metrics accurately assess your campaign’s effectiveness? The right KPIs and performance metrics vary depending on a variety of factors: What is your business type? What are your goals? What marketing activities are you engaging in?. You need to identify the metrics that are valid for your use case.

Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable metrics used to measure marketing effectiveness across all channels. It’s important to understand that not all marketing metrics are necessarily KPIs.

In any Marketing campaign, you need to be prepared for the unpredictable. Effective metrics answer questions and eliminate doubt: Rather than setting a campaign live and crossing your fingers in the hope that it will succeed, use insights that you’ve gained through metrics to strategically and efficiently plan your campaign.

If you put in the time to monitor, analyze, evaluate and act upon your performance metrics, you’ll be able to increase your competitive intelligence and assess your strengths and weaknesses. You’ll be better prepared to take budgetary decisions that have a concrete impact on ROI.

When planning a campaign, use deep, data-driven metrics to inform your Marketing decisions. If you know about your consumer’s demographics or have identified a particularly high bounce rate on your site, you can use this knowledge to justify either running or altering a particular element of your campaign.

Metrics help you evaluate your performance and assess whether your strategies have succeeded or need to be adapted. Plus, even if the desired outcomes didn’t come to pass, monitoring your metrics is an effective way of reflecting on your short-comings and learning from them, ensuring that your future campaigns will perform better.

It is time to stop being shy about how valuable data is in the digital advertising ecosystem. In the new era of openness and transparency, putting in place industry-wide measurement that specifically recognizes its contribution will improve the quality of data available, making it more useful for advertisers, leading to focused, on-message ad campaigns that matter to consumers. After all, what gets measured gets delivered.