Brain Vibe

So, you are thinking about creating an automated reporting system to monitor marketing performance across all your activities: direct, website, internet marketing, social media, e-commerce.  There are all these great tools out there with shiny dashboards and promises of business insight to drive your decisions in one place.  STOP!

It is not as simple as recreating your Excel spreadsheets in a database and copying the graphs to Powerpoint.  Forget what your analysts tell you.  The data isn’t the most important thing in this process.  Your business rules governing your data is the most important.  The business rules stem from your process, your plan, and the point of view of your business.  Make sure your establish your marketing plans and business rules as the cornerstone to your reporting needs BEFORE you go right to the data.

Most business intelligence projects are emerging from mature processes and the topmost functional areas that have application systems capturing and storing data as it happens.  There is a consistency around data elements.  For instance, finance, sales/marketing, customer service all work off customer data with sales transactions and relationship inter-actions.  The reason is that the application manages the data.  Where this breaks down is in the new world of cloud computing and SaaS solutions managing micro components of your business.

Your headaches in understanding marketing performance stems from this increasingly disparate view of your activities.  Traditional marketing is housed in your CRM system (ex. Siebel, SAP).  Website marketing is house in your web analytic suite (ex. Omniture, Webtrends).  E-Commerce might be managed with your E-Commerce provider.  Interactive marketing may be managed by your ad service (ex. MediaPlex, DART) or Google.  Each of these services have their own discrete view of the world and provide you with canned reports.  First and foremost all these various systems need to be bring data into a central repository before any consolidated reporting can happen.  This is where most reporting projects begin and move right to the reporting design and implementation.

Be careful.  This is the pitfall.

What makes the reporting in these disparate systems work is the business rules and processes that generate the data.  How a campaign is set up and tracked in one system can be very different than the other.  Cost management will vary by activity as well as marketing cost may be flat fees or operate through exchange systems with different billing methods (ex: by time, conversion, packaging). You want your campaign plans enforcing the management and reporting of activity across all marketing channels.  If you have not created this framework, you risk accuracy and completeness as feeds can have issues in delivery or have conflicting data that needs to be reconciled and/or adjusted prior to reporting.

As you begin your marketing performance reporting project, bring your sample reports and spreadsheets to the table during business analysis.  But, you also want to be sure you bring your marketing plans and business rules to the table as well.  This will ensure accruacy of reporting and mitigate issues in design, development, and implementation of your new dashboards.