Your Quickfire Guide to Unified Marketing Measurement

The importance of UMM

For you to be successful, you must be able to track and understand how individual campaigns across channels contribute to conversions. It’s also important to access user insight in order to optimize the customer experience you offer.

UMM provides an advanced approach to performance marketing that allows for budget allocation based on evidence, effective measurement of cross-channel efforts and detailed user insights that can be leveraged to inform future campaigns. Armed with this information, marketers can optimize each message they produce.

The main benefits of UMM include:

• Insights into offline and digital campaigns so marketers can better understand how these interactions impact conversions.
• The combination of aggregate and user-level data to better understand buyer journeys in a broader context.
• An integrated view of data collected by different attribution models.
• Real-time insights and analysis to optimize campaign performance in a timely manner.

UMM best practices

1. Ensure UMM is the right choice for your business

Before you dive in, it’s important to make sure that UMM is the right approach for your company. Due to the effort required to capture and integrate comprehensive data on a macro level, UMM isn’t suitable for every company and many don’t have the relevant historical data necessary to perform it in the first place. For some organizations, implementing multi-touch attribution with machine learning might offer a more appropriate solution.

2. Choose the right UMM platform

To get the most out of UMM, you need the right analytics platform to support you. Before selecting a platform, conside:

• Where it pulls data from (and how granular it is)
• Whether it can measure offline marketing ROI
• How it uses brand tracking
• How efficient it is in translating data into actionable insights

Moreover, the most effective platform should be able to optimize multiple KPIs, offer a consistent view of the customer and be flexible enough to adapt to shifts in the marketing landscape.

3. Implement UMM successfully

Before getting started, it’s important to ensure you've answered key questions that will facilitate the smooth implementation of UMM.

Make sure you've outlined who the stakeholders are in the operation and their specific roles. Set clear goals and metrics for measuring success, and highlight what your critical data sets will be. Additionally, you should be clear about how you'll perform optimizations during campaigns when they arise and how the insights you collect will be used in the future.

The purpose of UMM is to aggregate and normalize data from separate attribution models and to develop an integrated report that provides comprehensive insights of online and offline performance. Armed with this data, you can take steps to analyze it and improve your current and future campaign performance to deliver better experiences for your customers.

When doing this, be sure to plan for all of your multiple channels at once rather than allowing them to become siloed. Your data is much more valuable when you can leverage it to unify your marketing efforts. This being said, it’s also important to remember that each channel is unique, attracts a diverse audience and requires a different approach. Keep this in mind when planning your strategy and pay attention to the details.

Get ahead with UMM

As data plays an increasingly important role in marketing, successful customer interactions and overall business success, make sure you don’t fall behind when it comes to UMM. To future-proof your company, it’s necessary to take vital steps towards optimizing your marketing attribution capabilities to facilitate better campaigns that maximize ROI.

Further reading:

• 10 Marketing Processes You Should Be Automating
• How to Find the Perfect Marketing Platform
• The State of Marketing Operations in 2022 [Infographic]