So you’re running ABM display campaigns. Your budget has been approved, you have chosen a provider, and your ads have launched. You’re golden, right? Well, not quite. Running your campaign is all well and good, but now you need to determine how to best measure your campaign in order to prove the results to management.
Below are three actionable tips that will help you get the most accurate and complete gauge on your ABM campaign performance as you run campaigns. These assume that you have some background in display — for more on the basics, check out our previous blog post, 13 Keys to Success: The Ultimate ABM Checklist.
1. Redefine Your Metrics.
Too often, here at Kwanzoo, we come across customers who are interested in measuring campaigns based on leads alone, only to find that their campaign is blowing it out of the park in terms of engagement or another metric they hadn’t considered. But finding this out mid-campaign can cause problems. It can be difficult to adjust course when your team is committed to measuring success based on number of lead captures, only to find the campaign is succeeding on a completely different front. So it’s important that you redefine your expectations regarding metrics before your campaign starts, based on the type of campaign you are running and your advertiser’s recommendations for that campaign type.
Before you start a campaign, try to find an assortment of metrics you are interested in measuring, and do your research to find out which metrics are the best measures of success for your particular campaign. Running email retargeting? Net new leads are almost meaningless as a measure of success when you are running a campaign directed at your own existing email list, but ad clicks or website visits may both be meaningful. Similarly, for ABM display, lead captures mean much less than ad clicks (as an engagement percentage) and engagement by account (as measured by website visits and ad engagements per account).
Check out this web diagram on meaningful metrics across campaign types:
2. Look Granularly.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “can’t see the forest for the trees,” but sometimes the opposite applies as well. Aggregate marketing data is necessary and meaningful, but at the same time, sales interactions with prospects take place one by one, so it’s crucial that you are able to get detailed data on each interaction with your display campaigns, in order to pick out the highest engaging accounts or contacts and key targets engaging with your campaigns. Since this is ongoing data and time-sensitive, it’s important that this is available in real-time, ideally through access to detail data in a dashboard for your campaigns.
This may all sound a little vague, so let’s take a specific example from a recent campaign. Say that we have run a fairly successful ABM Display campaign so far, in which we are targeting a list of 1000 accounts using IP ranges, segmented into high and medium priority accounts, and are seeing 0.15% engagement with our ads, with 1/3 of the list of 1000 accounts engaged so far from our list. These aggregate stats give us a picture of the campaign performance, but a detail report on account engagement can give us invaluable insight on which accounts to prioritize for sales.
This sample Account Engagement Report breaks down account interactions and weights them according to number of engagements, engagement type, segment, date, location, and more. Here we can see, for instance, that while Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo both engaged with our ad, Goldman Sachs has over 2x more interactions than Wells Fargo, and is also a member of the high priority segment, suggesting that this account should be pursued aggressively by sales.
Not only does a detail dashboard give you the ability to act on information quickly to get results from your sales team — ongoing dashboard access also is instrumental in allowing you to develop baselines for your campaigns (based on past data), make adjustments, compare your campaign results to your expectations, and more. Reports like the one in the example above allow you to compare ongoing performance to your baselines and expectations, and evaluate your results as you run them, giving you much more insight into your campaigns.
3. Use Controls.
Marketing is a chaotic science, but like any science it can benefit from application of the scientific method. One of the easiest ways to put this into practice is through the use of control data against which to compare your campaign data – such as pre- and post-campaign website traffic, email opens, deals closed, and more. This tip depends partly on the data and resources you have available, but it is well worth your while in terms of effort. Having 2 million website visits during the first month of your campaign doesn’t mean much, but if you can prove that your website visits increased by 50% compared to the month before, that adds a lot more value in proving the effectiveness of your display campaign to your team.
Part of the beauty of display advertising is that, unlike an email campaign or webinar series, your control data can be evaluated and acted upon in real time as your campaign runs. For a successful ABM display advertising campaign, it is important to define a range of controls during your strategy phase, and then compare against them throughout your campaign. If you can, set up multiple layers of control data — for creative (alternate offers or messaging), account targeting lists (multiple account segments targeted), website visit data (compare website visits from targeted accounts to a list of control accounts not on your target lists) and more.
The Big Picture
ABM Display is one of the best strategies for reaching, engaging, and influencing key users at your target accounts. Done right, it works fast and it is cost-effective. But in the end, a campaign is only as good as the strategy behind it–so going into your campaign with the right setup and expectations is essential in order to get good results that you can bring back to your team. The three tips above should help you to come into your ABM Display campaigns prepared for a successful campaign run.