Increase campaign ROI with data reporting

Marketers waste an average of 31% of their budget, equivalent to £1.6m, due to poor data optimisation. And with the demand for ROI higher than ever, it’s getting increasingly difficult to justify marketing budgets. Tracking ROI can be complex at the best of times, but especially if you work with multiple channels for lead generation. Working with so many data sources and formats can make it difficult to make sense of the data, let alone the ROI.  

Whilst some businesses have marketing operations, martech, or data specialists within their teams to help optimize campaign data, unfortunately, not every team is this lucky. So how do marketing teams harness the power of data to increase campaign ROI? It starts with a data outlook from the start and some simple planning. In this article, we explore how marketers can utilise data reporting to bring the relevant data together and optimise throughout to improve KPIs. Ultimately, you should be able to create a world where you can confidently and easily work with data reporting to increase ROI, even during a recession. Let’s dive in! 

Step 1 – Audit Your Data Sources 

In order to maximise your campaign ROI through data reporting you need to know what data is available to you from the start. 

Chances are that your data is not centralised in one single place and bringing it all together will likely be a manual and time-consuming task. For instance, if you were running an omnichannel campaign you would have multiple data sources to combine and analyse for performance, including: 

• Google Ads 
• Google Analytics  
• Your email marketing tool  
• Company social media accounts/paid social  
• Your eCommerce platform (if you operate sales online)
• CRM

Understanding how the channels interact with one another through data reporting will allow you to identify any issues or opportunities/trends. From this you can act quickly, reducing wastage and increasing campaign performance to drive business growth.  

Step 2 – Identify the right metrics to measure  

As digital marketing continues to evolve, so have the metrics available to marketers to measure success. And with the widely adopted transformation to digital activities and demand for digital tracking, comes the potential for marketers to be drowned in data.  

This is why, once you are confident in your data sources, it is critical to identify the right metrics that you will measure against your goals. With so many available per campaign you need to take a step back and decide what you need to monitor and optimise for success. Don’t forget to look at how they interact with other channels and metrics. Remember, if you look at a metric in isolation, you won’t get the whole picture and could leave yourself open to missing trends or opportunities that could improve ROI.  

Here are some useful metrics that will be connected across most campaigns/channels: 

• Conversion rate – You can split this into overall sales conversion and then at a more micro level of which campaign converts the best  
• Clickthrough rate – for paid media or email marketing campaigns, this is a good measure of engagement  
• Cost per lead (CPL) – how much are you paying per lead per channel + the overall CPL will impact your budgets and indicate performance  
• Marketing qualified leads & sales qualified leads – understanding how many of each you need to hit your target helps you set an achievable outlook on the campaign  
• Revenue attribution by Channel – you can quickly identify the channels or vendors that generated incomes, and cut out those that don’t.  
• ROI – you can look at this per channel and also with the overall budget which might show you different trends. A low channel ROI could mean you move the budget to a better-performing channel, increasing overall ROI.  
• Customer lifetime value – this interacts with and can impact your ROI and CPL. If you have a long CLV you may not mind having a high CPL or a longer time period to achieve ROI 

Step 3 – Get the right data reporting tool to visualise campaign performance & marketing ROI  

One way to ensure you get the most out of your data is securing the tools you need to help you make the decisions for optimising your data. The best tools should make reporting easier whether you work with omnichannel or multi-channel. It’s common for marketers to rely on various tools for tracking marketing performance and activity levels, but they only achieve a cursory understanding of the marketing initiatives and how they connect with the business objectives.

When working with multiple data sources, ideally you want something that combines them into one holistic overview. Having these in place from the start makes this daunting task much easier. A marketing dashboard will combine data from siloes and separate marketing platforms to create an easy-to-understand visualisation. With ClicData, you can build report dashboards with all your data. The ClicData data analytics platform connects data from multiple sources to create dashboards that measure the performance of your marketing efforts in a single place.   

Some of the top pre-built dashboards you could include are: 

Data reporting: Email marketing   

Data reporting: Google Analytics 

Data reporting: Social media 

Ad Performance: Cost and ROI

The above report dashboards can be edited and connected to other data sources to help provide the overall data view that you need.  

The benefits of planning with your data  

Planning is key to getting the most out of your data, and with that increase your campaign ROI. By gaining a better understanding of what data you have available and how to work with it most efficiently, you’ll be able to go from drowning in data and wasting valuable time to analysing every part of your funnel to optimise for success.