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Advertising Management. The Hunt for ROI

joe.pistell

Uncle Joe
Apr 7, 2009
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What do you use for your Advertising Reporting system?
How do you manage your ad spends?
Does your Ad Analytics give you proof of ROI, or, does it fall short?

Do you have an agency?
How do you arrive at what works and what doesn't?
How much visibility do you have into your traffic sources?

Feel free to RAMBLE or RANT about your daily use.
 
What do you use for your Advertising Reporting system?
How do you manage your ad spends?
Does your Ad Analytics give you proof of ROI, or, does it fall short?

Do you have an agency?
How do you arrive at what works and what doesn't?
How much visibility do you have into your traffic sources?

Feel free to RAMBLE or RANT about your daily use.

Tough part about calculating ROI and Analyzing Reporting is about having so many channels to monitor: Site analytics, rankings, SEO, rep. mgmt, Social, E-mail marketing, SEM, Call Tracking, and so on.

Each channel has dozens of metrics to analyze to calculate ROI for your ad spends: Spend, Impressions, Clicks, Conversions, Cost per conversion, locations, devices, session duration, and all that good available data which if floating around in today's digital world.

Then you get into layering on time periods, performance of your spend over time, and comparisons of those time periods.....

On top of all that, reading that data and displaying it in a user friendly manner or putting it into a report for everyone - quickly - is not always that easy.

Obviously, with all the data out there - it IS possible to calculate ROI - and every dealer should be doing it!

Finding a comprehensive user friendly dashboard / reporting tool can be a tough task and a long hunt. We actually use our reporting tool to train marketing interns on HOW to read and analyze data for different campaigns using our tool for themselves- which speaks to its user friendly environment.

The tool we built and use for ourselves lets us look at live data via APIs all in one place. Its lets us get into very deep layers of data, depending how much of a data guru you are. It allows us to compare custom time periods, pull in dollar amounts, assist in calculations, and more. We have covered many of the major channels and can build custom APIs for other popular marketing platforms or new ones that come into the arena.

For reporting, we needed to stop spending hours on creating spreadsheets and charts. So we streamlined this. Our tool creates us reports with actual data (direct data or graphical) from a checklist selection of all the metrics we want to include and we can schedule the reports to go out at any frequency we choose to any team members we choose.

It saves us a ton of time and prevents us from having 20 tabs open in our browser when pooling data. Plus it makes accessing this data frequently much less time consuming.

But to close my rant - the data is out there. Everyone will have different needs and insights into their data, but If you are NOT calculating your ROI, you are most likely letting $$$ fall thru the cracks. Invest in a reporting tool that is comprehensive for your needs and fits into your workflow!

I would be interested to see what others have found success with and how often they access their data.
 
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