Impressions, conversions, click-through rate, time on site, transactions. Depending on your business and your media goals, there are a range of metrics you can track. But once you decide what to track, you face a more challenging question: What do you do with the analytics?

At EchoPoint, we’re big fans of tracking things you think you might want to know down the road. We’d rather track a metric now and not need it than realize six months into the campaign that we should’ve been watching that metric all along. But tracking doesn’t just mean watching and reporting on the numbers. The data is telling a story, and your media team can articulate that story. Instead of reporting just for the sake of reporting, the analytics insights should provide you and the team with actions to take, and those actions should affect the numbers moving forward. It may be a shift in media tactics or an optimization to campaign details. Maybe it’s an update to creative that helps boost engagement. The important thing is that there’s a path for delivering on the campaign objectives.

With an eye to the objectives, not all the data you’re tracking may be the primary KPI for all campaigns. For example, if the objective is transactions/sales, click-through rate (CTR) is only part of the story. When it comes time to provide insight around what portion of that traffic is completing the transaction, the analysis shouldn’t just focus on CTR, because that isn’t the goal. Instead, optimizations and recommendations might center on how we deliver more of the audience segment that is generating transactions.

For our tracking purposes, EchoPoint Media uses its own product called SIFT Analytics. SIFT can be used for monitoring campaign performance; media and market testing; and monitoring goals across various tactics. Using the SIFT Analytics dashboard, the team can review performance data, provide insights, and suggest actions. SIFT gathers the data; the team crafts the insights.

It’s important to make sure that what we’re doing is working toward the goals. And to guarantee that, we need to monitor the data. But without insight, the data is like a GPS without a destination: sure, you’ve got a lot of information, but it’s not taking you anywhere.

*EchoPoint Media is a wholly owned subsidiary of Young & Laramore. To find out more about EchoPoint, please visit our website at echopointmedia.com.