How Measurement Works
There are four steps of the process: data collection, classification, modelling calculation, and exporing results with dashboards, charts, and pivots.
Connect your online advertising, website data, shopping carts, and other relevant data sources. Upload offline advertising and marketing data. Enter your brand, competition, and location information where applicable, so that InContekst can retrieve your brand metrics and business environment information programmatically.
This creates a consolidated data warehouse / central reference point with sales, marketing, and business environment data all at your fingertips. Once complete, you can pull metrics describing the customer journey side-by-side and visualise how various marketing inputs affect the outcomes, create cost and sales benchmarks, explore data using business intelligence and statistics.
Different data types speak different languages. Advertising is reported by campaign, website traffic by page, and sales by product. The classification procedure connects all this data to common taxonomies, the main ones being customer needs category and geography.
The premise for needs category is that customers visit your store with a certain need in mind, and, for the most part, they buy to meet that need. Your marketing and advertising is also promoting the business as a place where that specific need can be met. Thus, although needs category can be broader than your product category, it is something that is constant across the entire customer journey.
Likewise, geographical location of the customer is consistent across the journey despite some inaccuracies near region boundaries, especially if you define your sales regions large enough. Ideally, your marketing and advertising should be regionalised as well, and digital advertising mostly allows that. For multi-regional and national media where this is not possible, InContekst can apportion such activity to sales regions.
There could be other business-specific common taxonomies, such as, in some cases, demographics. The eligibility criteria for a common taxonomy is that marketing and advertising, customers and sales, and other metrics of customer journey could be linked up to that taxonomy.
This correlates changes in marketing inputs, such as ad spend, and the desired outcomes, such as website visits or revenue. Depending on the specified inputs and output, the calculation reports on cost-per-visit, cost-per-sale, return-on-ad-spend, conversion rate, etc.
Initially the calculations are performed transparently using simplified models in order to deliver first results quickly and easily. As you become more familiar with the process, you will be able to construct your own models taking more factors into account.
Why is it called "model calculation"? InContekst uses technique called marketing mix modelling (MMM) to estimate effectiveness. More information: 9 points about MMM for marketers, or for more technically inclined - Introduction to MMM Math.
The tool allows you to look at the results from various angles - by media channel, by marketing message, and other groupings. Each time, the system will calculate the model transparently and present the results within a few minutes.
The results summary include effectiveness metrics, estimation of advertising impact, estimation of baseline, and assessment of confidence in the results.