Have you ever sat through a presentation by an outside marketing partner to discuss your latest online healthcare marketing campaign — and left the meeting more confused about results than when you walked in?
We have, too. Several years ago, before we started doing our own digital marketing for clients, we often collaborated on client work with agencies focused on digital marketing. And we’d get reports on client campaigns that were full of jargon and acronyms. We’d sit in those meetings and come away without much of a deeper understanding about how well the ads and messages were performing.
Since we’ve built our own digital marketing expertise, though, we don’t have to sit through those confusing presentations anymore. In fact, we do the presenting — and we’ve heard from our clients that we’re really good at interpreting metrics in a way that they can understand and act on.
The Trouble with Most Campaign Analytics
If your marketing team works with outside digital marketing agencies, chances are you get an automated monthly report or maybe access to a slick-looking data dashboard. The report is full of acronyms: CPC, CTR, BR, OR. Even the term for this kind of data, KPI, is insider-y.
How are you supposed to understand a campaign’s performance if you can’t decipher the key performance indicators?
Data dashboards look impressive but typically include only high-level information. And presentations and reports often focus on positive results only, so you can’t understand what’s not working and how to make adjustments.
Adding to the problem, digital media firms tend to share metrics without context or explanation. Throwing around terms like “multi-touch attribution modeling” or “behavioral cohort analysis” without explaining them isn’t insight — it’s obfuscation. Sure, that tendency can preserve their expert status, but it also leaves clients in the dark, unable to ask the right questions or make smart decisions.
A Better Approach to Understanding Data
We always look for opportunities to learn — and to share what we know with our clients. Our analytics reporting is a great example of that.
Rather than overwhelming you with raw data and automated dashboards, we focus on clear, human-centered reporting that connects the numbers to real-world outcomes. We highlight the most relevant performance metrics—like clickthrough rate, cost per click, and conversion rate—and explain what they mean in context.
By breaking down what counts as a conversion, calling out geographic trends, and identifying optimization opportunities, we help you understand not just how a campaign is performing, but why it’s performing that way and what to do next.
And everything we include ties back to the goals of the campaign. “Conversion,” for example, can mean a number of different objectives: Do we want your audience to book an appointment? Or is the effort more about raising awareness (in which case, conversion might look like visiting an educational page on your website)?
For our client campaigns, we show how they stack up against benchmarks for your industry, so you can see, for example, how the CTR for a Google ad is performing vs. the average for the medical industry. In subsequent reports, we move on to comparing month to month to show improvement. Our reporting also includes budget, so you can see how dollars are allocated across channels and how effectively those dollars are driving value.
It’s also important to look at ads or keywords that aren’t performing as well as we expected. That insight helps us refine and retarget, so the campaign continues to deliver better results over time.
What Marketers Can Do
In our opinion, some digital media agencies take advantage of the fact that they include a lot of jargon so their audience feels a little intimidated by the information coming at them. In those data presentations, you might think, “I should know what’s going on but I don’t.”
Cutting through the tech-speak is important; at the end of the day, this stuff is not that difficult to understand if you break it into the key points.
You should expect your digital marketing partner to provide clear reporting and common-sense explanation, not just raw numbers. If you feel you’re not getting the insight you need, don’t be afraid to ask key questions. You understand the goals for the campaign, so you can probe on how close you are to meeting them. How many clicks are we getting a day? What are we spending? What’s the cost breakdown? Of the actions we want people to take, how many are we getting a month? What are the benchmarks for our industry for this kind of campaign?
If you’ve ever sat through a metrics meeting and walked away unsure about what it all meant, let’s talk. We’ll bring the data and the translation.
Tenth Crow Creative is a brand marketing agency that creates, aligns, and promotes messaging for health and wellness organizations. Through insightful branding, engaging design and compelling marketing campaigns, we help these essential organizations find their identities and effectively communicate with their stakeholders so they can fulfill their missions.