Key Stakeholders in Developing a Comprehensive Measurement Plan

So, who should be involved in creating a measurement plan? Well, business leadership, obviously, because it starts with the overall business objectives. But then, of course, the marketing product teams, because these are the teams that play a central role in defining the marketing objectives, developing the campaigns, and the customer acquisition strategy. So having that information, everything from audience characteristics to the performance of marketing type channels, understanding where traffic is coming from, looking at conversion funnels and see the steps that visitors take on their website before they convert, and tracking and analyzing every customer touchpoint from buttons to downloads is all very important to the marketing team in terms of them making decisions, understanding, having the right data to make these type of decisions.

And then there might be digital marketing specialists. These are the folks who might run particular channels like search engine marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing, and they will have an expertise regarding those particular channels, and there's certain data that's very critical for their analysis in efforts to optimize campaigns on those channels. So they obviously do have a stake in it as well.

Your web developers and IT teams are responsible for implementing and maintaining the website and the navigation. So they're also going to be involved in the maintenance of the website. So they're also going to be involved in implementing the tracking codes and setting up, working to set up, or identifying the key events on the website that should be tracked.

So they can generally play a big role in terms of the implementation of your Google Analytics measurement plan. And then some organizations will also have data analysts and data scientists who are responsible for analyzing and interpreting data to crunch the numbers to come up with the recommendations. And they may have expertise in data modeling, statistical analysis, et cetera.

And so their role is certainly important in terms of customizing reports and customizing your tracking of customized event tracking and things of that nature, which we'll get more into later. And similarly, you have the customer UX specialists. They're going to be interested in the flow of the visitor to the website as well.

You know, what you can capture in various sales funnels, right? But they'll also be interested in engagement on a website, engagement time, what pages are visited, which videos are being watched, all of that, which has an impact on the user experience. So they obviously would like to be our shareholders or stakeholders in the measurement plan as well. And your compliance and legal teams, because there's data collection going on and it must, you know, be certain that you're complying with relevant regulations and privacy laws, everything from GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA.

So they're going to provide guidance on data governance, protection, and privacy. So that's certainly another stakeholder in the measurement plan process. Now, obviously, smaller organizations are not necessarily going to have as many specialists, right? And some of these tasks are going to be performed by the same person.

But so this is more looking at it from the various functionality that impacts the measurement plan, or would really need to have influence over the measurement plan, and would also receive the reporting and results regarding what is being measured. So let's take a look at an actual measurement plan, the sample one, of course. All right.

So, on the left column, we have the website objective, which is the overriding brand objective, you know, the business objective. So this is one of the business objectives to build brand awareness. In a real-life scenario, we would also attach a number to that.

We want to build brand awareness by 25 percent or, you know, increase brand awareness. But you want to then drill down to the marketing goals that are going to impact brand awareness. So, to get more brand awareness, what do you have to do? Well, some of the steps you need to do would be including drive traffic to your website, right, to maybe a content marketing strategy, because the more visits to your website, particularly if they are first-time visits, indicate that awareness has increased, right? You might, you know, also run paid social media campaigns, ads, or content boosting to targeted audiences to get more traffic, right? Or you might have a video that you create that's going to, you know, when people view the video, they'll get a background in understanding your company.

So you might have, you know, a campaign on YouTube, a content campaign on YouTube or TikTok, right? So those are the overall goals. But now we want to then segue to the KPIs. So if you want to see that traffic has driven traffic to your website from content generation, well, you want to track overall traffic on the website.

So website visits or sessions are the term Google AdWords uses for visits. Website sessions, you know, that's going to be a KPI, right? We want to see an increase in website sessions. Or we want to increase page views, right? So that's another KPI.

You want to increase page views. And then that comes down to the actual metrics and dimensions that we were discussing. So let's just go with metrics.

Metrics are numerical data, right? And we'll get into what dimensions are, so that, so if we want to, you know, increase, build brand awareness by driving traffic to our website, and where one of our KPIs is overall traffic to the website, and then the actual metrics that we're tracking on Google Analytics include the number of sessions, right? Which is a session equivalent to a website visit. So clearly, and we might say the number of sessions from new visitors, because sessions by visitor type are also tracked. The visitor type is either a new visitor or a repeat visitor.

So awareness is new visitors, right? Someone, maybe, you know, coming for the first time. So that would be the number of sessions and the number of sessions of new visitors. So that's the relationship.

We'll become clearer as we go through in more detail the metrics that are tracked on Google Analytics, and the dimensions that are tracked. But the idea here is that the metrics should relate to the KPIs that are important, have been identified as, you know, the ones that are going to be tracked. And those should relate to marketing goals.

And the marketing goals should relate to overall business objectives, right? And you can see it for the different categories, how that flows. Sales is the overall website objective, you know, the business objective for the website. And then you want to increase sales through the website, grow revenue.

So, a number of sales as well as the amount of money that's being collected on a website through purchases. And so the KPI would be, okay, we know we want to increase sales. So we want to increase the number of website sales.

We sold 100 units last month. We want to sell 120 units next month, right? Website revenue, that's the total amount of dollars. Those 100 units related brought in a million dollars.

So now we want to increase that website revenue. And then return on investment, you know, whatever we're spending on our marketing and such, we want to increase the return, get more for the money we're spending, right? And the individual metrics would be sales, revenue, returns, because that has to be taken out of revenue, right? We can also break it down by product in other ways, you know, so that would be some of the metrics that Google Analytics will specifically track to be able to, you know, get, you know, to be able to reach the KPI goal, which relates to the marketing goal, which relates to the overall business goal. So that's how it works.

So let us look at an example of a Google, of a measurement plan, which is a simple Google sheet that I've actually used in the past. You can click through your slides to it, but I'll just show you briefly what that looks like. So if I go to the front, you know, so your objective would be a high-level activity your company must take to stay in business, essentially, and fulfill its mission.

So it might be, in this case, to grow a new customer base. So the means of the KPIs is how you're going to get there, the means of assessing performance towards this business objective. So it might be new customer website traffic, right? Because you want to grow your customer base, it means you need new customers, right? So, new visitors.

All right. And then what the data source, in this case, we're going with Google GA4, the latest version of Google. And then you have the actual metric.

Sorry, pull up. What metric on a platform provides data, right? And we looked at some of the metrics on the sample measurement plan. So it would be, you know, and sessions, number of sessions, by session type.

And you really want to track the number of sessions that are from new visitors, right? The metric owner who's responsible for that, you know, the particular person who implements and audits this data source and metric. So you just note that. And then finally, when was this data source metric last audited? So you can have a running understanding of that over time.

And here's just an example. So grow a new customer base, new customer website traffic, and GA4 as a data source. And then the metrics would be new users, in that case, whoever the metric owner is, and then the date that it was last validated.

So as we go through this course, at some point, you might want to circle back to this and develop a sample measurement plan, you know, particularly as you understand more of the metrics and dimensions that are tracked on Google and how those could translate to KPIs.