When Place Marketing Metrics Work Against You, Not For You
Marketing metrics operate a lot like employee incentives. They start off with the right intentions in directing behaviour, but can quickly lead organizations astray at the first sign of difficulty unless they are well designed.
As business leader Martin Moore likes to say, “What gets measured gets managed. What gets rewarded gets done.”
Over the years, we’ve observed from afar instances where marketing metrics have been set up for economic development and investment promotion agencies that reward singular behavior or too simplistic of outcomes. When there’s too much a focus on leads, the larger picture of building demand and improving perception gets lost. This in turn makes meeting lead goals each year harder and harder because there’s no larger pipeline of new prospects.
Conversely, if volume metrics like impressions and clicks are rewarded, quality is often sacrificed. This results in big website vistitation numbers, but engagement rates drop and any marketing leads that are generated are of poor quality. In either case, marketing initiatives with narrow KPIs risk generating misleading results.
Context is everything in measurement and the best way to get there is through reporting on holistic metrics. Even if these aren’t necessarily required or part of organizational KPIs, they contribute to the bigger picture. (We’ve previously suggested several ways to do this based on budget and time in market with our place marketing measurement framework.)
Holistic metrics are capable of revealing quality and quantity; marketing and business impact; top line and bottom line results. Three areas where we most commonly see issues with this are:
Counting impressions and clicks as leading KPIs. If you were to give us a budget and these two KPIs, we can find a way to get you there. But that doesn’t mean it is the right way.
Driving to a single website action. This is usually when leads alone are prioritised, or perhaps some other desired interacation. But without context and other supporting measurements to back it up, there are ways to inflate these actions from external traffic without providing value.
Emphasizing CTR and CPC rates. These are great barometers as to how a campaign is performing week to week, but when they are left on their own to capture success (such as really small CPCs), it can result in poor decisions at the end of the day.
To avoid this, it is helpful to have multiple KPIs on various levels of significant and meaning that tell a bigger story at the end of the day. When we put together dashboards for our own clients, we summarize the top take-aways for a quick glance, but also provide deeper transparency into the full nature of how a campaign performs.
To ensure your organisation is measuring with context, we suggest the following:
Keep awareness AND lead actions in mind. Channels that enable lead capture are great, but they require balance with awareness generation as well. Both outcomes should be pursued in concert, which means both sides need to be measured, so consider this in your KPIs at the outset of a campaign.
Include engagement indicators. Whether this is through GA4’s engagement rate or other metrics like conversion rates or time on page, find ways to ensure any digital interaction considers quality, not just quantity. For certain channels like search or LinkedIn, consider integrating search queries generating traffic and executive titles for more insight into who actually is engaging.
Show results across the funnel. Our favourite part of our updated dashboards (created alongisde our friends at DCI; see below) is the marketing funnel to which we map digital actions. The path to purchase is far from a linear process, but by categorising actions according to the funnel stages, we can see how a campaign is performing in multiple dimensions rather than on a single plane.
Need help figuring out which metrics are best for your place marketing organisation? C Studios can help by assessing your marketing operation and recommending a strategy for execution and measurement. Explore more about our marketing services tailored for regions and countries.
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