Your Campaign Data is Mission Critical, By Luke Henkel

Today’s #digitalmarketer is under enormous pressure to account for every dollar of their client’s ad budget while simultaneously providing their leadership with actionable guidance.

Overseeing a multi-channel marketing campaign is a frenetic and often complex business and it’s just getting harder. For many marketers, the go-to reporting method is the ever trusted but equally unwieldy Excel spreadsheet. Excel was launched in 1987, the same decade that gave us Max Headroom, Alf, the Ford Taurus and Bartles & Jaymes Wine Coolers. I’m not knocking Alf, the point is that Excel has been around for….well forever.

But now for the good news. The new data visualization tools are more powerful than ever before. Data visualization isn’t new technology, but it is getting better, faster and more effective. Data is also becoming democratized, meaning you don’t have to have a PhD in advanced computer programming to benefit from it.

At Canopy, we’re obsessed with measuring campaign performance because it’s how you course correct when needed. We’ve worked hard to build trust with our partners and the best way to maintain that trust is to speak in plain language about what works and what needs to be improved.

Like many businesses, we relied on Excel spreadsheets to meet our reporting needs but after a lot of sleepless nights we decided that it was time for us to make a major capital investment so we could remain competitive and keep bringing value to our partners. After months of research and exploration we set our sights on Datorama, a software platform which Salesforce acquired in 2018 for a cool 800 million dollars.

As data visualization dashboards go, Datorama is cutting edge in terms of its computing power, while also managing to be simple to navigate.

Having a real-time window into campaign performance is invaluable and Datorama has fulfilled all our requirements. Like the majority of reporting dashboards, Datorama is essentially a group of charts that display critical information including key stats and data points. What differentiates Datorama from similar tools is its lightning speed and flexibility. It’s also incredibly user friendly.

The next step in deploying #Datorama has been to integrate it with #CanopyIQ™, our campaign management system. We are now delivering increased ad awareness, customer engagement, and website conversions by consistently optimizing campaigns towards a designated set of KPIs.

#CanopyIQ™ is based on the premise that we must validate our ability to drive KPI increases consistently and to achieve a stronger level of transparency with our clients. A bonus is that we are also able to review in-depth historical data so we can better understand how campaign optimizations drive stronger performance over time.

We’ve streamlined what used to be a complex onboarding process so that it now takes us just six key steps to create a customized campaign dashboard:

1. Determine the client’s campaign audience and enable cross-platform marketing intelligence and segmentation
2. Set specific and actionable stakeholder requirements to ensure everyone is on the same page
3. Summarize digital marketing KPIs to ensure we are focused on the right performance metrics
4. Integrate primary data inputs, including DSP, Google Analytics, SEO, SEM, social media and yes, even Excel spreadsheets
5. Funnel the key data inputs so our clients have a unified campaign view
6. Initiate cross-channel campaign reporting

The following campaign performance metric is based on an actual case study and illustrates increased website calls and form fill conversions over a period of seven months:

In this example, our client’s ad awareness KPIs improved over a nine-month period. The bar graph clearly demonstrates quarter by quarter growth:

This dashboard visual displays an improved Click Through Rate (CTR) over a nine-month timeframe. Note that halfway through the month of April the CTR is sitting at an elevated .24:

The Canopy IQ™ data management system provides us with the ability to prove our value to our clients by providing them with a comprehensive data management platform, easily understood data visualizations, and real time metric updates. We’d be glad to schedule a complimentary consultation with you at a time of your convenience.

In the meantime, thank you for reading!