Why your measurement strategy deserves more time in the digital spotlight

November 2, 2020

By Emmeline Toyama
Manager, Product marketing

Global audiences have been drawn to best-selling author and tidying expert Marie Kondo’s philosophy of organizing your home by category. Her method suggests that you can declutter your space with a few organizational best practices that include tidying by category, not destination. This approach can also apply to your measurement strategy—building a measurement framework based on your campaign objective, not just the end result.

Measurement can effectively steer your campaigns in the direction most suitable for your business; however, it’s easy to get sidetracked by focusing on too many marketing metrics. Here are some helpful ways to organize your measurement efforts, beginning with creating a proper measurement framework.

Create a measurement framework that looks at the whole picture

When building campaigns, it’s important to identify your primary business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs), like increasing brand awareness and driving sales. From there, determine which campaigns are best suited to address those objectives. Measuring complementary objectives is important, because consumers do not make brand or purchase decisions the same way. Return on ad spend (ROAS) measures the revenue your ad campaign is driving, but it only scratches the surface of possibilities for your brand, and may not be the right metric to focus on depending on the business outcome you are trying to achieve. Brands have the ability to drive a variety of outcomes, as you may have already learned in our last blog post, 3 ways to help your brand become top of mind.

Here are some best practices as you look to determine your measurement strategy:

Summarize your measurement approach

Ask yourself these key questions: Do you want to measure across channels? Are there particular audiences you want to reach? What metrics will be important? How often will you evaluate them? What do you want to accomplish? If you can easily answer these questions now then you are on your way to building a sound strategy.

Work backwards from the questions you want to answer

  • If you want to understand how your Amazon Advertising efforts contributed to general awareness or perception of your brand, you can measure brand reach and brand lift. These metrics will help answer questions like: What audience did I reach broadly? How does my advertising affect their perception of my brand?
  • If you want to learn how Amazon Advertising helped customers consider your products across non-Amazon sales channels, like your website, for example, you can use a third-party measurement provider to measure site visit rate. This metric will help answer the questions: How does my advertising drive traffic outside of Amazon?
  • If you want to understand how your Amazon Advertising helps drive off-line sales, then you can use metrics like off-line sales lift. Additionally you can use media mix modeling and multi-touch marketing attribution to help answer questions like: How does my advertising drive purchases relative to other publishers? And how does my advertising drive customers to purchase, over time, relative to other publishers?

Consumers perceptions and habits, at any given moment, can shift, just like shopping journeys—from online to off-line and across various channels. Looking for holistic measurement solutions that account for both customers shifting sentiments and the increasingly complex way consumers discover, consider, engage, and purchase with brands can help. Today, advertisers can leverage a variety of measurement capabilities from Amazon Advertising inclusive of retail insights, off-line lift studies, and Amazon Attribution to understand shopping actions at different stages of the shopping journey. Reach out to your Amazon account executive to learn more about using these solutions to augment your measurement strategy.