When planning an online advertising campaign, or reviewing results, the data can be overwhelming. It seems everything can be measured sixteen different ways. Other times, it seems nothing that matters is measured. Lots of data, but little to no actionable information.

When digital campaigns are not driving a single discrete activity, like an ecommerce transaction, selecting metrics requires care. We cannot measure the ultimate outcome (sales) with a long sales cycle and be agile marketers. It takes too long and there are not enough sales to provide meaningful insight into each element of a program. We have to select metrics that have sufficient volume and are available quickly as proxies for our long-term objective, sales and revenue.

The following framework is a useful starting place, [Read more…]