It goes without saying that you should be measuring your campaigns to know if your marketing goals and ROI targets have been met. But there are other less obvious reasons to spend the extra time measuring your efforts.

Team Alignment

Before planning your marketing campaigns, you and your team need to agree on what to measure and what success looks like. There are many times when companies get to the end of the campaign, reviews the results and no one agrees on which metrics demonstrate success and which ones don’t. To avoid this problem the team has to agree at the beginning on the one absolute success metric.

For example, I was in a situation where the person responsible for the pay-per-click (PPC) portion of a campaign was very excited because the cost-per-acquisition was much lower than expected. Unfortunately, this was not the metric the owner of the business was focused on. He was focused on sales, which were 20% lower than expected. It should be no surprise that he had trouble depositing his cost-per-acquisition in the bank.

The team would have been much better off with a laser focus on sales. Then they could have provided a secondary guiding metric to the PPC person for the acceptable cost-per-acquisition targets providing sales goals were met.

Focus on the Critical to Achieve Marketing Goals

How many times have you been involved in a marketing campaign where everything went worked perfectly – except the goal wasn’t achieved? It starts by not having the team aligned on the goal as mentioned above. But it gets worse when the wrong goal is chosen or the goal is not used as a guide during campaign development and execution. Many times this allows for campaign scope creep and a loss of focus.

I worked with a company that developed a big annual campaign to get customers to enter a contest. The goal of the campaign was focused on how many creative ideas people could come up with using the company’s products. An expert panel chose the winner. The contest was a great way to get customers and prospects engaged with the brand and show people how to use the products creatively.

One year, the goal was changed to focus on how many people logged into the contest software. Remember, the original goal was to generate ideas to show the value of the products. Because of the revised goal, the contest was split between soliciting new, creative ways to use the products and trying to get people to vote for a winner. In previous years, voting was not part of the campaign because it didn’t add to the original goal. The team spent hours and hours on tactics to get people to vote rather than just focus on getting fresh ideas. Not only did the goal of logging people into the software miss the target, the number of new ideas submitted was way down from previous years. If the company had stayed focused on the critical objective of exciting the customers with new ideas they would have been more successful.

There are endless examples where measurement goes way beyond just counting the numbers. Measuring marketing goals the right way can bring focus, alignment and ultimate success to your team and your business. Staying focused on what truly will move the business forward is a sure bet to increase sales and profitability.