Are You in the Picture?

Ensuring Accurate Data for Marketing ROI

 ROI. ROAS. ROMI. MER. ARPU. CPA. CVR. CAC….

These are just some of the terms used to describe models of measurement which illustrate the effectiveness of marketing by comparing the cost of activity against return.

Many of the platforms and systems marketers use provide analytics based on these models, however, in the world of evolving algorithms, sophisticated bots and intuitive AI, do your dashboards or reports give you the full, joined up picture in terms of value generated?

It’s a question that touches upon context, quality and time.

The context is in understanding not only what you want to achieve and when but ensuring that the tools and systems your business use, provide a truly holistic view of lead acquisition, conversion and retention. The question of quality addresses who we are reaching and how we are securing new customers and clients. How much genuine insight into behaviour do we have? How much detail and accuracy does the data really hold and allow us to draw upon? There is also timing. How long is our payback period? Are we looking to secure transactions in the short term or looking to drive long term profitability through the acquisition and growth of high value clients or customers? If so, how long can your business financially support this? Poor or misleading data will reduce your window further.

These are points we know a robust commercial strategy should recognise, but we should also apply scrutiny to our methods of analysis. Maintaining a healthy scepticism is a good way to mitigate wasted spend and lost opportunities. As a timely example, “bad” bots are increasingly effective in tricking ad platforms into thinking they are qualified leads by completing lead forms which drives even more bot traffic to your ads. The result? Wasted ad spend, polluted data and no genuine leads. Similarly, bots are impacting website analytics and social media profiles, generating distorted visitor spikes, likes, shares, and comments on posts giving the impression of popularity and reach, ultimately diverting marketing investment and literally creating a “false impression” for targeting future content.

To counter this, new tools are being introduced block suspicious IP addresses from viewing and interacting with your online presence, ads and touchpoints. These should be considered and investigated, and form part of a more joined up approach to ensuring data and lead quality. If you use a CRM system, ensure that you have a plan to validate and purge data received - including the logic fields on forms, build-in behavioural CAPTCHAs and if you are investigating how to best use AI in your business, consider AI-powered bot management tools to detect and remove bot - based anomalies in your traffic. When combined, these will provide a line of defences to deliver cleaner, more accurate and reliable data - and more realistic evidence of genuine return on marketing investment. However, we must also ensure that with ever more sophisticated threats, we too must keep our controls and mitigation measures continually up to date.

If you’d like to discuss how Latitude can help, we’d love you hear from you...enquiries@latitudeonline.co.uk