Automation and AI have given us tools to reduce (often drastically) the time we spend on more tedious PPC tasks.
This means that, as agency partners, we need to shift to acting more as consultants to our clients. We need to use our expertise to provide strategy and guidance that leads to business growth rather than busy hands-on work.
A key area where we can leverage our expertise is identifying how customers can use data effectively while ensuring compliance with evolving security and privacy regulations.
1. Confirm where your customers (and your agency) are with marketing analytics maturity
Over the past decade, the marketing analytics space has grown exponentially. Where are your customers? Factors often include:
Budget Age of the company Leadership’s willingness to invest the right resources in the right tools
A one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. As a result, it’s important to find out the extent of customer resources right out of the gate. Use these questions to guide you:
Do they have a dedicated marketing operations team that you can freely communicate with? Or are they still learning how to configure Salesforce objects? On average, how long do they generally need to process data or analytics requests? Are they doing any media mix modeling, touch or multi-touch attribution? Or are they still trying to figure out attribution altogether? Do they use Google Analytics 4 or another reliable web analytics platform?
Confirming the maturity stage of your customers’ marketing analytics is only the first step in the process. You should also know where your agency stands with its marketing analytics maturity. What range of services are you able to offer to your customers?
Let’s say your agency is still in the “informational” or “real-time” phase (see chart). In this case, it is unlikely that you will be able to successfully assist a client seeking to incorporate more predictive technology into their marketing practice. However, this situation can become a great opportunity to seek resources (including third parties) to do so.
If you encounter similar analytics-related challenges across many customers, consider investing in an internal resource to help them solve them. For example:
Train your analytics and data team members on the Salesforce reporting platform. Hire a marketing operations specialist to help clients with tagging and tracking. Create a task force to figure out the best predictive tools and methods to use across the agency, given your own resource constraints. Build a roadmap to get your agency to a place where you can confidently say you’ve reached the “prescriptive phase.”
Ultimately, as agency partners, our goal is to ensure leadership has confidence that marketing activities translate into business success. Positioning your agency as a strategic partner with effective analytics scope can inspire confidence in your clients’ leadership teams.
Dig deeper: 3 steps to effective PPC reporting and analytics
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2. Future-proof by preparing for disabling third-party cookies with server-to-server tracking
By now, you’ve even heard that third-party cookies will soon be a thing of the past, with Google expected to phase them out entirely by the third quarter of 2024. If they’re not already, your customers will be asking about the implications for their media strategies.
Today, almost every major ad platform offers an offline conversion tracking solution. By default, this conversion tracking method does not include cookies. As a result, your first step should be to enable this option for your customers on all platforms.
In addition, take measures to audit the quality of the data transmitted to these systems. With routine audits, the agency team can continue to optimize for ideal conversion rates.
The best practice for seamless tracking, however, is to implement server-to-server tracking. At a surface level, server-to-server tracking creates and stores a unique identifier on the client’s private server when a user clicks on a tracking link or generates an ad impression. This identifier replaces pixel-based (or client-side) tracking, which stores customer data in their web browser.
It is important to note that server-to-server tracking is no a way to circumvent privacy and compliance restrictions. Rather, it bypasses browser-based privacy restrictions and ad blockers.
If your agency isn’t already doing this, now is the time to create an enterprise-wide initiative to get everyone familiar with server-to-server monitoring. Then you can start helping your customers understand the importance of configuring their technology stacks to enable this method.
Implementation can take a long time, especially when databases require reconfiguration to generate and store these unique identifiers. While your agency may not oversee the technical execution, it is essential to be a good consultant to your clients and set expectations for what they will need. It’s also helpful to have good resource recommendations if you or your clients don’t have them available internally.
3. Don’t over design your analytics strategy
Ad platforms have been releasing a new AI or forecasting tool seemingly every two months. When you consider the countless other third-party analytics SaaS on the market, it can be overwhelming to keep up.
Remember, just because a tool is new doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, or even the right tool for your goals. When considering new tools and workflows to incorporate into your analytics strategy, ask yourself the following questions:
Will it help me collect accurate and timely data better than my current solution? Can it help me analyze trends deeper and better than my existing technology stack? Will it provide more useful information than I currently receive? Will it help me meet regulatory requirements better than I already do? Can you do what I already do, but cheaper?
These elements are some of the most basic pillars of any marketing analytics strategy. If some flashy new tool or strategy doesn’t satisfy one of the above, it’s probably not worth allocating the resources.
It’s also critical to consider where your agency has reached on the marketing analytics maturity path. If you’re operating in the “informational” phase, adopting a more advanced media mix modeling or incrementality testing tool may not be your top priority.
The path to becoming a great data steward
Between the rapid deployment of automation and AI tools and the demise of third-party cookies, many agencies’ roles continue to shift toward the consulting end of the spectrum.
For agency partners, becoming a great data steward starts with knowing how, why, and when to incorporate analytics into paid media planning and ultimately guide clients toward readiness future of their businesses.
Dig deeper: 6 tips for tracking and analyzing PPC results
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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