From Vanity Metrics to Information Overload: The Evolution of Marketing Analytics

Over the past decade, marketers have transitioned from focusing on vanity metrics to grappling with an overwhelming abundance of data. While KPIs and performance metrics are essential for measuring the success of digital advertising campaigns, there’s a tipping point where too much data becomes unmanageable, leading to analysis paralysis.

The rapid expansion of technology has flooded marketers with data points, making it challenging for marketers to focus on the metrics that truly impact their goals. To effectively optimize campaigns, marketing teams must prioritize the data that matters most and use it to drive actionable insights.

Retailers need to understand how to monitor and act on marketing performance amid the complexity of today’s digital landscape. What should they expect when partnering with a competent performance marketing provider?

Navigating a Complex Market

The dizzying growth of advertising platforms and martech opportunities has created a complex landscape for ecommerce advertising. While most retailers initially allocate their budgets to major platforms like Google, Amazon, and Meta, marketing within these walled gardens is becoming increasingly competitive and expensive.

Looking beyond the biggest platforms for other high-value traffic sources is becoming more important. For many merchants, it’s nearly impossible to establish effective marketing relationships with hundreds—or even thousands—of traffic sources across the open web and to monitor their performance efficiently.

This is where Connexity comes in. With decades of experience, we’ve built strong relationships with the best traffic sources across the open web. We’ve developed direct integrations with data and tools that allow us to track the performance of individual placement IDs. This granular level of tracking is the foundation of our dynamic pricing strategy, enabling us to bid more aggressively on high-performing placements while reducing bids on underperforming ones, an approach to ensure we meet retailers’ cost-of-sale goals and significantly increase the efficiency of their ad spend.

The Futility of Retrospective Analysis

It’s natural for anyone investing in growth opportunities to scrutinize results and look for outliers. However, asking detailed questions about every budget allocation is often easier said than done, especially in the complex and competitive world of retail marketing. According to Forbes, 80% of companies report collecting too much data, leading to information overload that they cannot use effectively.

The key insight here is that these aren’t the right questions to ask. It’s akin to betting on a horse race after it’s finished—you simply miss the opportunity to participate. In the short term, this approach yields no gains; in the long term, it results in lost market share and unsold goods in warehouses.

We believe that focusing on outcomes is a far better use of a marketer’s time and resources. By providing the strategic guidance needed to drive campaigns, marketers can concentrate on what they can control: budget allocation and performance goals.

Useful Performance Analysis

Outcomes benchmarked against campaign goals is the most useful level of focus for a retailer to take on performance. Whether expressed in ROAS, COS, CAC, AOV or some combination of KPIs, retailers should expect marketing partners to track and report performance to the retailer’s primary goals. Understanding the efficiency and incrementality of these measures at regular intervals and trended over time enables ongoing investment decisions.

Performance against campaign goals over time is what Connexity provides. Our retail partners, nearly half of the biggest US Internet retailers (the IR100) and hundreds more, review performance with us every month. We produce various reports to view sales generated from spend, with trends and interval comparisons (like QoQ or YoY). We also track efficiency and incremental growth achieved against the retailer’s primary KPIs.

Importantly, and unlike most ad networks, Connexity reporting is measured against the retailer’s own model of attribution. We use attributed sales data supplied by the retailer as a “source-of-truth” input to guide optimization and in performance measurement, ensuring we deliver meaningful campaign performance insight.

What retailers find most valuable is our ability to continuously meet or exceed performance expectations and to the optimization we manage on their behalf without requiring excessive oversight. Consistent performance insight at the right level of focus builds trust to continue investing in what works. That’s why Connexity has been in the ecommerce space for over 25 years and why we currently oversee $5 billion in annual sales with 2 million monthly transactions on Connexity placements. We scale product ads cost effectively across influencer promotion, commerce content, product search, dynamic product ads, e-commerce shopping sites and emerging markets like Buy Now, Pay Later mobile apps.

Moreover, with nearly half of Connexity inventory exclusive for our retailers, we efficiently deliver incremental gains. For example, our ShopYourLikes influencer platform regularly delivers 2X the rate of new customer acquisition over other channels and our access in search auctions delivers about 25% incremental PLA impression share.

In Conclusion

To achieve the outcomes you expect, work with a partner who can manage performance at the necessary level of sophistication. Connexity is a managed service that empowers retailers to do just that. All you need to do is specify your performance goals and budget, and we’ll handle the rest.

Our experienced Account Managers and Campaign Analysts oversee always-on systems designed to prioritize your best placement opportunities and constantly optimize dynamic pricing, driving efficient performance toward your goals.