Your Marketing Data May Be Lying to You
Inspect Your Marketing Data to Ensure You Have the Facts
Are you certain that the marketing data you're presenting is both comprehensive and accurate? Can you guarantee that it isn't either under-reporting or over-reporting? And are you genuinely achieving the level of success that you tout throughout your organization? If you're not actively inspecting and refining your data, chances are you probably can’t confidently answer these questions.
Understanding your data at the most detailed level shouldn't solely rely on your marketing analytics practitioners. It's imperative that you personally grasp what is and isn't included in your data. To truly excel as a marketing leader, you must diligently track the marketing tactics you develop and ensure they're accurately represented in your measurement and reporting efforts.
Inventory Marketing Campaigns and Assets
Maintaining an inventory of your marketing tactics is essential for efficient data management. This process provides a comprehensive list of what should be included while helping to identify any inadvertent inclusions or exclusions. This becomes especially important when sharing technology and analytics tools with others.
Relying solely on technology systems to determine the contents of your marketing data can be risky. Mistakes such as misconfigured campaign tracking or data exclusions due to errors are not uncommon. By maintaining an inventory of campaigns and assets executed, you establish a checklist for quality assurance, ensuring that all expected elements are consistently included each time you extract your marketing data.
“Achieving success in data-driven marketing and reporting hinges on a meticulous understanding of your data down to its most granular level.”
Thoroughly Examine Your Marketing Data
Ensuring that your data contains everything you anticipated is crucial, but this assurance only comes through meticulous inspection after data collection and aggregation. Even automated processes are susceptible to errors, necessitating the implementation of quality assurance measures. Without such practices, there's a significant risk that your marketing data may lack the expected elements.
Once you've verified the inclusion of expected data, it's imperative to assess its completeness. Are all numerical fields populated? Are text and META data fields fully filled? Scrutinizing for unexpected blank fields and values ensures comprehensive inclusion and accurate calculations.
Additionally, it's essential to validate the formatting and accuracy of all text and META data to prevent omissions caused by errors. Consistent spelling across values is crucial to avoid complications arising from multiple versions of the same data. Inconsistent META data often leads to the exclusion of marketing tactics from data and reports.
Create Layers Of Quality Assurance
Creating layers of quality assurance is essential, especially when dealing with large volumes of frequently updated data. While personally reviewing the data is important to ensure its accuracy, involving others in the review process is necessary to catch different types of issues.
Incorporating individuals responsible for setting up marketing strategies within the technology systems into the review process provides an additional level of assurance. This allows for a double-check of the accuracy of setup and data export. Marketers who execute the campaigns also play a crucial role in this process, as they are best positioned to verify that the data aligns with the content they pushed into the market.
Introducing automated quality control mechanisms provides another valuable layer of assurance. These mechanisms excel at detecting nuanced issues that may evade human observation. By implementing automated checks for anomalies like unexpected zeros or irregular fluctuations across time periods, you can identify elusive issues that significantly affect data accuracy.
In Conclusion
Achieving success in data-driven marketing and reporting hinges on a meticulous understanding of your data down to its most granular level. Neglecting these practices introduces a significant risk: your marketing data and reporting may lack accuracy, potentially leading to misinterpretations of performance and accomplishments.
Ensuring data accuracy begins with confirming the inclusion of all relevant data and guarding against unintended inclusions. Thoroughly inspecting data values for completeness and errors is essential for closing any problematic gaps and enhancing accuracy.
By implementing both manual and automated quality assurance measures, you can uncover and address various types of issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. Together, these practices instill confidence in the authenticity of your success and the accuracy of your reporting.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Marketing Leader | Adept Entrepreneur | People Developer
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
