How To Setup Success Indicators For Digital Strategy

The most important aspect of monitoring performance is tracking performance long-term. Over time you will be able to compare against past performance. Most importantly is that you can track progress against KPIs. The slide above is an example of a weekly dashboard report. In it, you would list your KPIs that you are tracking this year. X represents the current weeks’ results, the coloured arrows show changes in performance. Is there an improvement, reduction, or no change? Whatever the result, always ask yourself WHY? This should be used the consider potential improvements, changes and builds.

Reports can be viewed as complex documents, but for the most part, when reports are pulled from social sites they just excel documents with headings that change. At the very beginning of your campaign, as you pull reports to collate information for your first report, you should note what columns you are collating information from. This overtime will improve your speed at reading and pulling reports. Whatever your KPIs, you should begin to identify where in the Excel reports these numbers are located. Common figures found in the documents are used to calculate KPIs that aren’t necessarily listed:

Cost Per View = Total Spend ÷ Total Views

Cost Per Engagement = Total Spend ÷ Total Engagements

Cost Per Click = Total Spend ÷ Total Clicks

Cost Per Thousand =Total Spend ÷ (Total Impressions ÷ 1000)

The most important element of the reporting function is agreeing your KPIs from the beginning and setting up your dashboard report. Once this is filled out you can clearly see changes with the traffic light system and over time with trend graphs identify specific patterns and learnings.

While workloads can be larger, there is one benefit in having a smaller team and that is the reduction in the chance of human error in reporting but also reduction in inefficiencies. The person reading the report in smaller teams can, in real-time, make alterations and changes to campaigns for performance mid-campaign. In larger teams, processes will result in changes being slower to identify and slower to implement.

The challenge is to maintain agility as your team grows. This can be achieved with teams that have shared dashboards, regular updates (even in an email) and WIP meetings regularly. As a manager, if you wish to monitor performance there are automated report update emails that can be activated in your ads accounts to get specific reports delivered into your email inbox daily, weekly or monthly.

We must identify not just how to utilize digital platforms, but how they can integrate with other activity that sits across wider activities. TV is definitely one of the strongest mediums digital can support. Most TV viewers sit down in front of the TV with there mobile device in front of them and social sites open. There are two key tactics that can be implemented:

Trans Time Mapping: When you buy a TV ad and you are given very specific times and channels for when it will be shown. If you ensure those TV show’s audiences are targeted with both your creative and search activity to support that TV campaign during those times, two things can occur. 1. users are more likely to click on content because the TV is fresh and they identify with the campaign 2. there is a higher recall of your TV creative.
Hashtag Integration: Consider if your TV creative has social planned at the centre of it, in the sense that you hope to create some conversation that if your hashtag is listed at the end of the TVC clearly it will give audiences the correct hashtag to participate.

Radio operates similar to TV in the sense that if you know the Trans Times for your ad creative on the radio you can map supportive content to those audiences and times. In addition to this, radio stations can add a lot of value to hashtag usage for your brand if they run giveaways that require users to use your brand hashtag. Outdoor & Press and social are becoming more and more integrated as OOH sites become more connected. Consider howl content, images from hashtag usage and conversation might be displayed on digital outdoor sites. At the very least, like TV, use your hashtag on your creative to let your audience know how you wish for them to converse with you (Hashtag integration is effective with the press too).

PR is the discipline with the simplest and most effective points to integrate with. PR is essentially designed to create a conversation (editorial) with the media that readers see. PR should be used to integrate into the following tactics:

Influencers: PR usually have the best connections and contacts among influential communities. They have the ability to make arrangements and deals for social ambassadors to feature in social campaigns utilize there own social channels, reach and authentic voice. Influencers could also contribute to the content on your site offering SEO advantages.
Media Integration: When PR teams are sharing new press releases, a clear opportunity for social integration is in press releases giving media clear hashtags and channels that they can share for there readers to find out more about the brand or campaigns.
Media Partners: Sites in your region that sell ad space have probably introduced content as a product. Talk to your regional media publishers to see what they have on offer. For example, in the Irish market, the best example of a publisher to partner with is JOE.ie or SportsJOE.ie for the male 18-40 audience.

With digital, ask yourself as part of any digital activity, ‘how could social be a backbone to the campaign’? How is digital a part of the core message or activation? How can content live outside of social media channels on wider digital stages? How can hashtag usage be incorporated on digital media or with activity by partners? The most important point around integration is that it is not an excuse to ‘shoehorn’ social media everywhere. It should be integrated with locations that make sense to who you are speaking to, what you aim to achieve and how useful it is.

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