Does Marketing Automation have a Reporting Problem?
Apr 25 2018 | 06:00 PM | 10 Mins Read | Level - Intermediate | Read Mode
Chitra Iyer Editor in Chief, Ziff Davis B2B
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At MTA, Chitra creates research-based content that reflects the dynamics of the martech industry. She also lends her expertise to help plan and execute diverse campaigns, events & content strategies on the MTA platform, based on unique client needs. With over 15 years of experience in strategic marketing and communications, she has a great grasp on the way marketing professionals approach technology, their need to evolve and transform as marketers in the digital age, and the challenges therein. Specializing in Content Strategy, Digital Marketing, and Loyalty Marketing; and having worked on both the marketer and the vendor side, Chitra has a knack for writing about martech in a way that simplifies this complex landscape for the end-reader, while still addressing the depth and layers of the subject. Chitra has studied media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and worked at blue-chip companies including Timken, Tata Sky and Procter & Gamble (P&G;).
While marketing automation undoubtedly changed the game for marketers and marketing, is it evolving at the pace of marketing? With data as the fuel, seamless CX linked directly to revenues is the major preoccupation of present-day CMOs. Can – and to what extent should – Marketing Automation cope with those complex reporting requirements?
CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) BUYERS’ GUIDE 2019
Welcome to the 2019 edition of CDP Buyers’ Guide. As customer data platforms are becoming increasingly necessary for enterprise marketers, it is also becoming more complex to choose the best fit CDP platform amongst the pool of new and old vendors.
DownloadLead generation is dead. Long live lead generation …as long as we can track it back to revenues.
The modern marketer has seen some drastic evolution in role, expectations, and deliverables in the recent past. Of course, marketers can still indulge in all the glamorous advertising and award-winning direct mail campaigns they want – as long as they can show the ROI of the activity and its impact on revenues.
Thanks, marketing automation (not), for starting it all!
Marketing automation made its big bang entry into marketers’ lives with its game-changing manifesto and it has more than lived up to that promise.
From a back-end system designed to automate repetitive tasks and drive scale, marketing automation has come a long way and more than lived up to its manifesto. In my view, Marketing Automation’s greatest contribution has been to democratize marketing, allowing medium and small marketers to punch – and scale - way above their weight .
Once marketing became responsible for business outcomes in terms of lead gen and conversions, could revenues be far behind? CMOs are now expected to explain just how much of the revenue they have been able to bring in, given that a bulk of operating expenses goes into ‘marketing’.
And since a bulk of ‘marketing’ happens through the marketing automation system, it's only logical that the system should be able to report on the link between initiatives and outcomes in terms of revenue contribution, not just campaign metrics.
Has it? A recent satisfaction survey report from Heinz Marketing and Insight Squared seems to suggest it hasn’t.
The report released earlier this month, surveyed 410 marketing and sales professionals who use Act-On, HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, or Pardot. Survey respondents represented multiple industries and ranged in size from SMB organizations to large enterprises.
The key finding was that MAPs today are unable to meet the more complex attribution-focused reporting marketers need, instead still catering mainly to campaign-level reporting . In their words, ‘Analytics/ Reporting capabilities is the most important feature considered when deciding on a MAP, yet it ranks last in user satisfaction and trails perceived importance’. MTA Category Advisor for Marketing Automation, and CEO of DemandGen David Lewis, in a comment to MTA agrees with the hypothesis that marketing automation vendors have largely neglected this aspect of their offering.
But wait…there are two sides to the story.
While the report shares to some extent (a representative) voice of the user, we decided to check in with industry stakeholders and see what they thought about the issue, including the authors of the report.
Before you read some of the highlights from their comments further in this feature, take a minute to process this one point that came up repeatedly in response to our question ‘what can marketers do better, to make the most of what’s available on marketing automation platforms today’?
Its teamwork….and patchwork
An attribution-focused approach to defining ROI will - by the very nature of present-day multi-touch, omni-channel marketing – remain a complex, patchwork operation. The entire concept of connecting outcomes from one specific tool/ set of campaigns to revenues seems at odds with the idea of ‘seamless customer experience’, where journeys and contacts are ‘orchestrated’ and no one campaign, or contact can claim full credit for the outcome.
As Martech Advisor Category Expert on customer data, David Raab says, “The challenge with attribution is tying together all the contacts with a given company, including early anonymous contacts such as website visits. Obviously, this is an imperfect science since necessary data may be missing. There’s also the challenge of attributing credit to multiple touches through the process”.
That said, it is not unreasonable to expect more comprehensive reporting from MAPs. As we said earlier - they do process the bulk of the marketing efforts and it would seem natural for them to evolve to more attribution-focused reporting, in addition to campaign-driven metrics.
MarTech Advisor asked several marketing automation users and vendors what they thought about the state of reporting with MAPs, and here are our top takeaways from those conversations:
(Comments may have been edited for brevity and flow)
1. Joe Chernov, CMO at InsightSquared
The system of record for both (sales and marketing) needs to be the CRM. That's where the revenue data lives.
Certainly, data contained in the MAP is critical for unpacking the extent to which marketing programs influenced revenue, but the CRM needs to be the "source of truth" went it comes to business outcomes. One of the reasons marketers are so frustrated by the reporting in their marketing automation solution is because MAPs take a marketing-biased perspective on the business, whereas the rest of the executive team takes a revenue-biased perspective, leaving marketing leaders on an island.
2. Brian Hansford, Vice President, Heinz Marketing Inc.
The focus for so long was on activity-based metrics. [Now] The attitudes and behaviors are based on proving what is happening with the business, and how marketing influences those results.
Just a few short years ago it was OK for CMO’s to say “we don’t have the data” or “we’ll be there in a few years” about marketing contribution to revenue. CMO’s skills are growing rapidly in managing technology and data. This growth has revealed a number of areas that MAP vendors are coming up short in helping CMO’s capture and analyze the results that are most important for the CEO, CFO, and board. The bottom line is MAP systems are strong in capturing the data and metrics of specific campaign tactics, but they are poor in measuring the overall revenue performance that CMO’s require. Our survey data backs up this sentiment.
3. Ariane Lindblom, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Marketo
Measuring results and proving impact are critical for every marketer. Purpose-built analytics for marketers should be a key decision criterion when choosing a MAP.
From knowing what resonates and performs with each audience and investing marketing dollars wisely, to proving marketing’s impact on the business through pipeline and revenue attribution, analytics is the foundation for marketers to engage customers in smarter ways and to confidently steer the business. We are investing in purpose-built analytics for marketers from interactive dashboards to AI-powered analyses that identify best segments for expansion, the right content for personalization, and more.
4. Pierre Custeau, Vice President Product for Eloqua and Content Marketing, Oracle Marketing Cloud
Few of the numbers you see on the Marketing Automation Platforms dashboards and reports have currency signs next to them, this is no longer acceptable.
Most marketing automation analytics today focus on the data the platform generates or has direct control over. For years those metrics have been used as a proxy to a marketing organization’s impact on revenue. With more CMOs now carrying actual revenue objectives, these metrics simply do not cut it anymore. Some key metrics of the past would actually be trending down while actual impact on revenues may in fact be going up.
The only way to keep up with the evolving reporting and analytic needs of marketers is to offer capabilities that extend the reach of MAP within the organization. Going forward, MAPs will need to provide better ways to model revenue, to look at the total lifecycle value of audiences and find ways to optimize such things as media spend.
5. Nate Skinner, VP, Product Marketing, Salesforce Pardot
MAPs are becoming increasingly intelligent as we look back on the last five to ten years of innovation in marketing automation.
Marketers should have a strong understanding about what the overall business goal is and key KPIs they need to benchmark for success. It’s important for marketers to measure the impact of their content across channels – how engaged are prospects and customers with your content? What constitutes engagement for each channel? What type of engagement is most likely to lead to conversion? Having a strong understanding of each channel’s KPIs and how to leverage MAP features and functionalities to track and analyze will help marketers continuously test and measure what activities are driving the most impact. Enabling marketers to prioritize channels that drive ROI is key, and multi-touch attribution dashboards do just that - identifying which programs and campaigns work best across the entire buyer journey.
6. EJ McGowan, Vice President, General Manager at Campaigner
As new marketing channels emerge, marketers not only need the ability to execute on them, but they also need reporting capabilities to measure their effectiveness and reach.
MAPs are constantly working to improve the tools marketers have to measure their marketing programs’ success. Rather than looking at what reporting features MAPs offer, marketers should first set their business goals and identify what metrics are needed to measure performance against them. They should make sure goals are specific and quantifiable, and set benchmarks to track their progress against. Once goals are identified, marketers can assess their MAP’s reporting features and capabilities to build out the reports needed to track their goals.
7. Ed Breault, Vice President of Marketing and Industry Solutions at Aprimo
Most MAPs show limited dimensions of metrics and not the complete upstream or downstream story.
This includes strategies and objectives tied to programs that then span the lead-to-close cycle. Marketers need more details to give the C-suite and board to show a comprehensive picture of how activities relate to conversions and bookings. Also, attribution in many MAPs is murky, which can lead to gaps and inconsistencies in reporting.”
“For example, I report bookings analysis (monthly/quarterly/annual) views to my CEO and Board. KPIs include separate marketing originated and influenced bookings as a percentage of total revenue. This includes pipeline metrics, such as percentages of MQLs Accepted by Sales, MQLs to SAL, Actual vs. Plan, SAL to SQL, Actual vs. Plan, and all QoQ percentage changes.”
8. Will Devlin, Sr. Director of Marketing for MessageGears
The data is interesting and actionable within the MAP or ESP but it needs to tie into the overall picture to truly be effective and for marketers to learn more about their customers.
Many are not (keeping up with the evolved reporting metrics of marketers). You'll see some MAPs and ESPs offer attribution reporting, for example, that tries to show marketers different models of attribution within the messaging channels. That's not useful attribution - you're siloing that analysis and focusing on the wrong overall metrics at that point. Email performance, lead acquisition, and campaign metrics are important pieces to a larger puzzle that needs to focus on lifetime value and brand loyalty. The data needs seamless integration back into the internal systems.
Our take
Marketing Automation needs to show more strategic, revenue linked reporting to earn its seat in the boardroom. From the commentary we received for this piece, it certainly seems like something Marketing Automation vendors are aware of and working on. It would seem like too good an opportunity to pass up, and too strategic a feature to ignore!
When CMOs can patch MAP reports together with (paraphrasing David Raab) ‘external resources – generally found outside of marketing automation - reports from advanced analytics tools, data management platforms such as the CDP, device graphs, and lookups - to help make some of the necessary connections’ and then cross-link it to the CRM, where the revenue data lives - is when a tenable connection can be made between marketing and revenue. Till then, even getting attribution within the marketing budget right would be a great start.
Undoubtedly, Martech Advisor will be tracking and reporting on new tools in the emerging ‘join the dots’ category . Watch this space!
If you or a small/ medium business you know is looking for a marketing automation solution, MarTech Advisor's unbiased and well-researched Marketing Automation Buyers Guide could help make a more informed choice. Access it here with just one click.
