Bridging the Gaps: Measuring Marketing Impact in an Omni-Channel World

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The businesses of today and the future require the ability to provide consumers with as seamless an experience as possible when they interact with your brand across different touchpoints. Yet it is not enough for businesses to leverage the many channels marketers have at their disposal. The ability to measure the effectiveness of omni-channel activities, and the ability to act upon the insights gained from measuring their impact represents the holy grail for marketers. Some brands are already increasingly seeking to quantify and qualify their activities across desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and, more recently, even wearables like smartwatches. Yet many marketers are still not adept at measuring even a single channel, much less multiple channels.

To understand this better, the problem of building an omni-channel strategy in marketing and sales needs to be tackled first and then we can explore how and why marketers are still struggling in this area. For instance, 85% of CMOs fail to measure omni-channel strategies, and only 40% of marketers measure mobile app revenue, when in fact the lifetime value of customers (LTV) is higher for shoppers who shop both online and in-store.

For example - a game developer company drove business growth by identifying the channels its best users were coming from and then increasing resources and activities on those channels. On the other hand, a food manufacturer company who wasn’t properly measuring or attributing their activities across TV and mobile ad campaigns eventually realized they could drive a 45% boost in retail sales by using end-to-end attribution across TV and mobile to identify and engage potential consumers.

Here we offer an actionable set of best practices and principles culled from experience in cross-channel measurement:

Become a master of one

Before diving into an omni-channel strategy, a marketer should become an expert in one channel. This expertise will act as a foundation to the more complex problem of measuring accurately across many channels.

Understand the technology

Marketers must learn how to use an advanced attribution platform capable of tracking consumer behaviour across channels. This is the first step to anticipating where consumers are coming from and what they need at that moment.

Determine channel location in the sales funnel

Each channel influences different stages in the sales funnel: from building awareness, to creating desire and interest, to securing the sale. Knowing how each channel complements the other is crucial for providing a seamless experience for consumers.

Personalizing a consumer’s journey

Up to 85% of shoppers respond positively to personalized promotions and coupon offers. Optimizing each stop in a consumer’s journey allows for a personalized experience that will help push them through the funnel and the sale.

These learnings allow marketers to appeal to a new breed of omni-channel consumer, one who increasingly wants complete information and access at their fingertips - including features, pricing, discounts, reviews, payment methods and other product data.

Mastering Mobile

Let’s back up for a minute and explore further how to “become a master of one,” as mentioned earlier. This is a brief guide covering what marketers need to know about how to measure the bottom line of mobile activities.

Revenue Measurement

Lifetime value measurement is centered on two key components: the amount of incoming revenue an average user generates and the cost required to acquire an average user.

When it comes to the first part, focus on measuring your total revenue broken down by source. Armed with information will put you in an ideal position to properly optimize your revenue streams and ultimately increase your average user’s LTV.
To get things started, define and measure revenue events with your mobile attribution partner. But what exactly is a revenue event and what types can be measured?

Let’s break it down.

1) Standard in-app purchase event: It goes without saying that of the many in-app actions you should measure, a purchase event is a must as it is the largest source of revenue for most apps. Proper purchase reporting is necessary when running CPA-driven campaigns where the action is a purchase.

2) Rich purchase event: Measuring purchase events will only scratch the surface of the data that can be retrieved. Granularity is always important to get the sharpest insights, but this is especially true for purchase events. For proper revenue optimization, it is highly recommended to have an in-depth knowledge as every cent counts. This is done by adding multiple parameters to the purchase event so you’ll know not only that a purchase event took place but also buying what - with great detail, by whom, when and for how much.

3) Custom revenue events for paid apps and subscriptions: A custom revenue event will enable you to measure incoming revenue from this source, With, a more predictable stream of revenue, subscription apps can be more accurate in their LTV modeling but this can only be done if you know what to expect and that comes from measurement. The key thing here is that when one knows more about money that’s expected to come in, spending on marketing becomes that much easier. Deduping activations from different devices that go through the same account is also important because charges are mostly done on the account level, not the device level.

4) Out-of-app revenue events: LTV calculations will be significantly impacted by purchases performed in other touchpoints like the website, mobile website and even a brick-and-mortar location. As such, if a user that was acquired by the app from a specific source goes on to make purchases outside the app, that user’s LTV and the LTV of the acquiring source obviously change, and with it your performance data. That’s why connecting any out-of-app revenue events to your app marketing data is an important part of measuring LTV. How is this done? By setting up a server-to-server In-App Events API, which will allow you to automatically send these events to your measurement partner.

5) Revenue postback: It is highly recommended to allow your measurement partner to pass on revenue data to your media and service partners (analytics, A/B testing, automation providers etc.). This will enable them to take advantage of the data for better optimization and its use in advanced audience targeting campaigns like personalized retargeting and lookalike targeting.

Connecting the dots

How important is it for app marketers to analyse ad spends with returns and optimize for the channel or channels they’re leveraging? Mobile activities need to be measured through any of the above mentioned ways. These methods gain significance when one can connect the dots through multiple touchpoints and measure the impact of their cross-channel promotions. The early adopters of mobile measurement understand the benefits and acknowledge that it is the best measurable ecosystem ever created. With multiple identifiers, any app marketer can accurately measure their campaigns from start(impressions) to finish(ROI).