Campaign planning, with variables like competitive spend, weather, seasonality, trade volume, economic conditions, fashion trends, health fads, hairstyles, income levels, pets etc can be chaotic. It’s important that planners, interaction designers and analysts are aligned in their objectives. Planners use their audience intelligence insight and negotiation prowess to get the message in front of the right person at the right time. UX Jedis use the Force to create high quality experiences that make a user want to convert. How do they know if they have been successful? Enter the analyst!

Analyzing click-through, view-through and even residual data is a lot like looking at page impressions. They do not tell you what to do, only that you got someone to do something. They are however, clues that can be used to build more effective metrics. Analysts must not only create actionable metrics that are based on campaign goals, but need to tell a story to planners, interaction designers and their clients. Measurement of a digital media plan does not happen by accident, it requires collaboration, planning, testing, learning and repeating.

Start by defining campaign success. Next, build a page tagging recommendation and agree on success metrics.
Incorporate the model into reports and dashboards. Socialize metrics with marketing strategists, user experience gurus, digital media planners and client marketing analysts. Most importantly, dig into the data and your model to tell the story. The elementary metrics are not enough.