How to take your marketing strategy from a crawl to a sprint

Measurement is the foundation of everything we do in performance marketing. Without accurate measurement, what we recommend, use, and improve is, at best, guesswork. Maintaining accurate measurements is more challenging than ever – and getting harder.

Deregulation and increased privacy concerns, as well as long multi-touch journeys, combine to create a balancing act. Brands still using ten-year-old tactics will not be able to overcome modern measurement challenges.

If your brand falls into this category, it’s time to rebuild your measurement base — from aggregating first-person data (crawling), to creating cross-channel reporting for actionable insights (walking), to advanced media mix modeling (MMM) and testing the growth of real media adoption (performance).

Clarity: Building a first-party data base

Without the integration of first-party data into your performance marketing channels, you rely entirely on third-party signals. Although these metrics can be useful, they are high signals and do not show how the channels affect your business goals.

Audience integration

The first step is to integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) data into your paid media platform. This includes:

• Remarketing to throwaways.
• Creating an opt-out list for current subscribers or recent buyers.
• Compiling important contact lists.

You may be uploading a list today, but aggregation improves targeting by connecting to the latest audience lists for media platform targeting.

Offline conversion tracking

For lead generation businesses, the next recommended step is to set up offline conversion tracking (OCT). It shows the low impact of your media on sales. Integration transmits sales data back to campaign support platforms.

With OCT in place, you can prepare for lower funnel, higher conversion rate steps in the sales cycle or even start revenue stream preparation to improve your return on ad spend.

Setup is easy. You can add a click ID to your form and transfer it from the platform to your CRM. Most of the top CRMs today, like Salesforce, integrate directly with platforms for ease of use.

Server side tracking and permission mode

Getting the momentum from crawling to running requires heavy lifting, from client-side tracking to server-side tracking.

Client-side tracking is an automated process for transferring conversion signals from your website to your media platforms. The user’s web browser sends that signal, which allows the loss of the cookie, ad blockers, or strong browsers like Safari to muddy the signals and reduce the accuracy of the data.

With server-side tracking, instead of relying on the user’s browser, you use a dedicated tagging server to capture signals from your website and send them directly to the platforms. This bypasses browser-based tracking and relies on your first-party data. It keeps your data accurate and robust as privacy restrictions increase and cookies disappear.

You have two main methods of integration:

• Integration of partners an easy option, as it uses pre-built connectors to be set up by partners like Shopify, Tealium, Google Tag Manager, or similar platforms.
• Direct API it is difficult to code and requires complex data or custom backgrounds, and it requires a team of engineers to build it.

How you set up server-side tracking depends on the paid media channels you use, your technology stack, and your integration approach. Both options require a dedicated cloud hosting server, which adds cost, but is worth it to better understand your media investment.

Journey: Channel reporting integration

With a solid foundation of scale in place, the next step is to break down platform silos and realize a full ecosystem.

Last click pass

With server-side tracking, you’ve created a clean data pipeline. Last click and first click give full credit to the first or last step, ignoring the full funnel path the user takes.

Platforms offer advanced attribution models, such as Google’s data-driven attribution, but still tend to silo data within their platforms. For example, a user clicks on a Meta ad, then searches and converts to a Google ad. In this case, each platform needs to be modified.

The solution is to use a data warehouse, such as BigQuery or Snowflake, to integrate your data from your website, CRM, and other platforms. From there, you can use custom logic to build a multi-touch attribution model that aggregates your data using your first-party identifiers to see the full journey and attribution across the ecosystem.

Integrated reporting dashboards

With advanced attribution, the integrated reporting dashboard will combine platform performance data (views, clicks, impressions, etc.) with your first-party aggregated conversion data (using server-side tracking and advanced attribution). There are many dashboard builders – the easiest being Locker Studio, as it integrates directly with BigQuery and Snowflake, making it plug and play efficient.

With a dashboard in place, you can now visualize data across the funnel to get actionable insights on where hardware is driving volume, conversions, and impacting your bottom line.

Implementation: Media mix modeling and growth assessment

Now you have a detailed, day-to-day view of the performance of user-level events and insights. But important questions remain.

• How do you know if a channel has room for further growth?
• How do you measure offline performance like a TV ad?
• How do you know the trick is working?

Understanding the full impact of your media investment and strategy at a macro level requires a media mix model and growth assessment.

A complete overview of MMM

Think of MMM as your compass strategy. It provides a comprehensive, statistical source of truth for your paid media investments by measuring the relationship between your media impressions and business results (revenue or leads) over time.

This is not an everyday tool. You usually use it on a 3-, 6-, or 12-month cycle, depending on your data volume, and it requires 2+ years of data to cover the season and promotions. The model then runs a regression analysis to determine the relationship between your input and business results.

With MMM, you get channel-specific information that removes channel bias. It helps you answer important questions about diminishing returns, budget allocation, and the impact of capital investments on income. That clarity helps you make smarter decisions for the next quarter, half, or year so your marketing dollars drive maximum impact.

Pulse tests with a growth test

Growth testing validates both MMM and your marketing efforts. Measure a single strategy or channel by dividing your audience into two groups: a test group that sees the strategy and a control group that doesn’t. It compares the results between the groups, the difference representing the increasing height.

You can separate test and control groups using user-level tracking, individual-level tracking, or geo-level tracking if individual tracking is not possible. It answers an important question: if the user didn’t see the ad, would they have converted anyway?

This shows the true superiority of a particular platform or strategy and helps you decide whether to stop bidding on product terms for existing customers. It can also measure your MMM.

For example, if MMM reports paid community drives $1 million in revenue, but the growth test shows an increase of closer to $500,000, you can return that to MMM to improve future forecasts.

Sprint: Clean, integrated, and verified data for the first team

With first-party data combined with server-side tracking, cross-channel reporting, and custom attribution, build a solid foundation for measurement.

Guided by MMM and certified by a growth test, you are ready to run – with a system that helps you make better decisions and clearly shows the impact of every investment.