Doing Measurement Frameworks The Right Way

Measurement frameworks are a critical component of the connected measurement strategy we deliver for our clients.

No two businesses are the same when it comes to measuring performance success. For example, a publisher who is generating revenue from ad impressions is going to have very different objectives and KPIs from a business that is focused on lead generation.

Done well, a measurement framework can be transformative to businesses in:

Ensuring the right measurement is in place to measure marketing performance.

Democratising data effectively through intuitive dashboarding and analysis.

Delivering competitive advantage by running advanced analysis at scale.

Creating a measurement framework is far from straightforward, and requires a structured approach to fully harness its capabilities.

This guide shares our top tips and advice for creating a measurement framework that is meaningful, purposeful and relevant to your company.

Let’s begin with defining what a measurement framework is.

A measurement framework is a structured way to define your company’s:

Overarching mission or vision

Business and marketing objectives

Primary KPIs

Secondary metrics

Segmentation

A measurement framework defines what success looks like for your business. It provides a single point of truth for defining your objectives and KPIs, providing clarity over how these are measured and segmented.

As soon as possible! If your company does not have a measurement framework then you should adopt one now as part of your measurement strategy.

If your company already has a measurement framework in place,when was this last reviewed?

A measurement framework should continually evolve and iterate to keep pace with developments in technology and progress against your company’s business and marketing objectives.

If it has been several months, or even years, since your measurement framework was last updated then take the opportunity to review whether the measurement framework continues to align to your company’s objectives and KPIs.

Creating a measurement framework is the first step on the road to accountable and data-driven performance marketing.

Your company should create a measurement framework to be able to:

Provide absolute clarity around your business and marketing objectives.

Clearly define what success looks like for your objectives and KPIs.

Provide total transparency, and a single point of truth, for how your objectives and KPIs are measured and segmented.

Ensure measurement is customised and democratised.

Creating a measurement framework is not straightforward, but is absolutely achievable by carefully considering the following areas:

A measurement framework can only ever be as good as the people that feed into it. A measurement framework should not reflect the thoughts of a single person or stakeholder, it should be a collaborative process to ensure all requirements are covered.

Running initiatives such as a measurement workshop is a great place to start, ensuring the process of creating a measurement framework remains inclusive and collaborative at all times.

Does your company have a clear mission statement or vision?

If so this will usually form the overarching component of your measurement framework.

If not, we recommend that the mission/vision is clearly defined ahead of your measurement workshop. If this is not possible, you could use information from your about us page as a proxy in the short term.

Having clarity around the mission and vision in advance enables measurement workshops to be run in the most effective and efficient way.

Ensure that your measurement framework references both business and marketing objectives, as these are intrinsically linked to one another.

If your measurement framework is focussing more on marketing objectives, then make sure there is a clear reference to the wider business objectives for context.

An objective is best thought of as a statement of what you are trying to achieve, for example “Grow audience volume visiting the website”.

You should aim for 3-5 distinct objectives to ensure your measurement framework is kept focused and on-point.

For each objective, consider what the single most important metric is to define success.

For our example above we may choose sessions as our most important metric to measure the objective of “Grow audience volume visiting the website”.

For the primary KPI to have context, meaning and purpose, you should consider a measure for what success looks like.

This would typically either be a target your company is striving to achieve, or a forecast of what you could realistically expect based on the sales and marketing activity you are intending to carry out.

For example, our primary KPI may be “To grow audience volume by 20% YOY, and achieve 120,000 monthly sessions by December 2024”.

Secondary metrics are critical in providing valuable context behind the performance and trends in your primary KPIs. They help to connect the dots, providing meaning and purpose that will form the basis of any future analysis or hypotheses.

Taking our example above, we may consider secondary metrics around audience volume to be metrics like pageviews per session, sessions per user, engagement rate or conversion rate.

These secondary metrics will allow us to understand whether we are being effective at bringing relative and meaningful audiences to the website, providing context to the headline primary KPI.

Analysing objectives and KPIs at an aggregated level only tells part of the story, and often leads to valuable insights and opportunities being missed.

Segmentation is a powerful mechanism to deliver competitive advantage by analysing your objectives and KPIs to a more granular level.

Taking our example above, we may wish to segment our objectives and KPIs by dimensions such as source, medium and campaign.

This level of segmentation will identify which specific marketing touchpoints or campaigns are driving growth in the headline numbers.

Creating a measurement framework is the first step on the road to accountable and data-driven performance marketing.

Investing the time in creating measurement frameworks the right way offers multiple benefits to businesses.

They provide absolute clarity in articulating your company’s business and marketing objectives.

They provide complete transparency around your KPIs, and how these are measured and segmented.

They enable your company to customise measurement within multiple marketing platforms and systems, delivering connected measurement that is relevant.

They aid democratisation of data across your organisation, enabling the creation of intuitive performance dashboards and data-led hypotheses from meaningful analysis.

They provide a platform to deliver competitive advantage, by combining advanced analytical techniques alongside the use of technology.

A measurement framework is typically one of the first initiatives we deliver for our clients in crafting a connected measurement strategy.

This article was originally published on RocketMill's website.