To make adjustments on the fly, a marketing organization should start with the simple question, "how did our campaigns perform, today?” Unfortunately, it turns out that this question is not at all trivial to answer. We are operating in a marketing landscape that is getting increasingly complex, and the unfortunate result is that without a keen understanding of data, optimization efforts are just shots in the dark.

Marketers seeking greater agility recognize that they need timely, detailed performance data and end-to-end visibility of their campaigns. Many report devoting hours of their work weeks—sometimes more than 50 hours a month—to deciphering marketing signals and campaign results. Many still struggle to make sense of the data, likely due to an overwhelming number of campaigns, systems, and resulting signals. A typical complaint is that they have multiple systems that capture and measure marketing signals, and these siloed systems fail to “talk” to one another, making it impossible to truly see—and act on—issues and opportunities in a timely manner. On top of these problems with siloed data, many marketers lack the horsepower to track enough marketing signals across their various channels—and they cannot measure those signals with enough frequency and depth as they should.

Leading companies are exploring ways to automate the process of collecting, refining, and analyzing performance data so that they no longer spend time trying to understand “what happened last month,” but instead get immediate answers to “what happened today” and “why did it happen.” Teams no longer can afford to meet every few weeks with their analysts and agencies to read through manually generated reports based on stale data from two weeks prior. They instead need to be monitoring performance against their goals every day so that they can proactively act on insights in real time.

To enable faster, more effective campaign optimization—marketers should establish processes and deploy systems that empower them to:

• Measure the right signals at the right time: Establish what needs to be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly.  Everything every day can be overwhelming so one needs to understand the timing of measurement that can help them improve current campaigns and inform decision making for future campaigns.
• Measure all signals across each channel: Limiting the number of marketing signals tracked across each channel limits learnings. Marketers should measure all signals, within and across all channels. Only then will they have the breadth and depth to confidently make optimization decisions.
• Ensure full visibility into marketing performance: Eliminating holes in visibility and bridging gaps between disparate systems will give marketers the “big picture” view needed to most accurately and effectively optimize campaign performance.
• The right tool for the right job: Rather than forcing teams to spend hours compiling, scrubbing, and studying data to identify insights, marketers should seek technology that can do it for them. This will not only allow marketers to focus their efforts on execution and optimization, it will help prevent long lag times—therefore making those optimization efforts more effective. This also means one’s data needs to be of the highest caliber.