Comments on: Six Easy Steps for Measuring Marketing

By: Gin and Topics: Equality, SEO, and a Sheep Expert | Spin Sucks

Gin and Topics: Equality, SEO, and a Sheep Expert | Spin Sucks — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:02:26 +0000

[...] Six Easy Steps for Measuring Marketing. It’s a big no no for me to link to anything on Spin Sucks in Gin and Topics, but I’m [...]

By: Josepf

Josepf — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:57:15 +0000

@ginidietrich @Adam Boatsman I avoid carrots like the plague! !00% of the people who get the plague die too….

By: ginidietrich

ginidietrich — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:58:18 +0000

@Adam Boatsman I’m glad I don’t eat carrots!

By: wabbitoid

wabbitoid — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:01:11 +0000

Great stuff, people need to think this way if they are going to prove themselves! The only thing I want to add is that there is often a time delay with advertising, so what we spend this month may not come in for months. Design of Experiments is very important if you are looking for correlations. I recommend either constant effort or constantly increasing effort if you are going to find a correlation – an effort that has a big splash and then decreases (like, say, book publishers) will often give you a mush of data for months that is impossible to make any sense of.

By: Adam Boatsman

Adam Boatsman — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:50:56 +0000

Thanks for all the commentary folks. I’ll knock out responses with this comment.

With statistics, remember the old saying – 100% of all people that eat carrots will die. What statistics is really good for is either proving out good ‘gut assumptions’ or proving that your good ‘gut assumptions’ really aren’t as good as you thought they were – you need to keep digging for better assumptions.

As some of the comments have indicated – sometimes you do need to do a little deeper digging. For example, if Company A purchases Company B, of course sales increase. However, so would the likely sales growth goal and associated marketing spend as both may have had the same marketing / pr as a % of sales.

In observing our clients, what I can say is that those that cut marketing first typically have had sharper sales declines than those that kept marketing relative to sales and measured the effectiveness of the campaign – meaning that those that continued to spend and measure effectiveness continued to either keep (or sometimes increased) their marketshare of a diminished pie (e.g. realtor example).

Adam Boatsman

http://www.makeanimpactcpas.com

By: The Communication Industry Has a Perception Issue | Spin Sucks

The Communication Industry Has a Perception Issue | Spin Sucks — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:46:35 +0000

[...] With digital marketing and communication, we have the opportunity to measure our results. To show exactly how our efforts are translating to actual dollars and cents (if you don’t know how, Adam Boatsman wrote a phenomenal post yesterday on how to get started). [...]

By: adamtoporek

adamtoporek — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:09:45 +0000

@rebeccadenison Ah, so right. Correlation and causation — not the same.

By: adamtoporek

adamtoporek — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:08:58 +0000

Nice post Adam! I think I was just teleported back to finance class. I would agree with @rebeccadenison about considering other variables, and I would add, particularly macroeconomic conditions. It would be like a realtor looking at her sales in 2006 versus 2009 and only looking at her marketing spend when analyzing it.

Still, very valuable information. Thanks.

By: jonbuscall

jonbuscall — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:03:11 +0000

Great stuff! This is the kind of post I like to see. I’m rubbish at all this kind of stuff so it helps to get an insight into how people with a real head for figures approach these issues. Thanks immensely.

By: rebeccadenison

rebeccadenison — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 19:05:24 +0000

These are some great (and simple!) steps to start measuring marketing more effectively.

I have to disagree about using R as a means to measure causation, though. R is supposed to measure correlation or a relationship between two sets of data. But we all have to be careful using something like this as cold hard proof that our marketing is driving sales. What about advertising? PR?

Or say for example your marketing spend increases because your company has been acquired recently and the budget is bigger. Sales may go up too, but can you really say it was all because of marketing? Likely not. The acquisition may have helped, too.