Validate and Prove Campaign Results

In a figurative sense that is what happens to digital marketers all the time. Marketing professionals have struggled for decades to reliably connect campaign analytics with sales transactions and prove their impact on company revenue. 

Physical sales are relatively straightforward, but the online marketplace is full of complex variables that cloud and hinder the customer journey. The inability to demonstrate a clear return on investment has resulted in CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) having the shortest tenure out of all C-suite positions. At AiAdvertising, one of the driving forces behind the creation of our Campaign Performance Platform (CPP) was solving this ongoing problem by giving marketers  the tools and technology they need to prove their performance. 

First we’ll examine several ways marketers have traditionally tried to correlate conversion results, and then we’ll see how our software has improved upon them. 

KPI Tracking

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like impressions, conversions, or engagements have long been the go-to way for attempting to prove campaign success. However, there’s often no definite way to know what tactic was most effective. Social media, natural site traffic, and even backlinks can muddy the water. KPIs can be a solid way to set goals for your campaigns, but they provide an incomplete view when it comes to proving the campaign’s impact on business results. 

Ad Attribution

With this form of result tracking, a platform such as Google will give credit to an ad based on certain parameters you’ve selected. It can be set up to give credit to the first or last ad clicked, or more intricate variations like linear attribution that distributes credit across all ads on the conversion path equally. This issue is that customers do not always take a direct approach to making a purchase and this doesn’t give you a comprehensive view of performance. For example, a customer could end up delaying their purchase until the attribution window has faded. Marketing is instrumental in the influence of the sale, but this would not be reflected in the analytics. 

Landing Pages

A custom landing page attached to an ad with a form or phone number can be a great way to collect leads and establish a clear “paper trail.” The main issue though is that there’s no guarantee that the customer will follow-through, or they may eventually convert through another method. There’s still several degrees of separation between the landing page and the eventual conversion. Plus, depending on the situation, it’s possible for a client’s internal sales initiatives to be conflated with the leads derived from the landing page. 

The AiAdvertising Solution 

While that is not to say these previous methods are useless (far from it) AiAdvertising provides a much more advanced system, the Campaign Performance Platform. During the onboarding process the CPP is tightly integrated with all forms of a client’s digital real estate. It ties every campaign directly to revenue data analytics through a convenient and easy-to-use dashboard structured around the KPIs we’re trying to measure. We also collect information on each user that interacts with a brand and aggregate it into a unified data lake. That way, we can take account of customers who decide to convert later down the line or take a more circuitous route through the buyer journey. 

In conclusion, there’s no need to keep losing the credit for hard-won sales to forces outside your control. Everyone knows that digital marketing is beneficial, but now we actually have the technology to prove it in a consistent manner. With the CPP, clients will be able to clearly see how your efforts are influencing their bottom line, leading to increased CMO tenures, additional business opportunities, and more data to build even better and more personalized campaigns in the future.

What would this type of results-driven advertising platform mean for your team? Contact us today to learn more!