Before you can start with any analytics task, you will need to assess two things. First, you'll need to ask what the goal of the analysis is and what KPIs you'll use to evaluate success. Second, you need to take stock of the data you have access to. You have to assess your data sources and get a good sense of how you will get the data you need to perform your analysis. In this video, we'll take another look at what it means to define your goals and KPIs. In the next video, we'll look at assessing your data. When you're asked to analyze marketing data, you typically won't get that question in a vacuum. You may be asked to analyze data to evaluate the success of a campaign, or the marketing team may want your help in defining a target audience for the next campaign, or they may want insights from historical data that can help them decide how to better allocate their budget in the future. In all those cases, the marketing team has a business goal in mind. In some cases, they will clearly formulate that business goal, but in other cases to go may live inside someone's head but may not have been articulated well. For you to be successful as a marketing analyst, it's important that you take a moment before any analysis to write down the business goals. To formulate a business or marketing goal, well, it's good to follow the smart goal template. The goal you formulate should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Keeping this framework in mind will help you extract the right information from the marketing team. You can guide them to help them define a goal that is smart, which will make it easier for you to conduct your analysis and evaluate whether their goals have been reached. Here's an example of a smart goal. It's the example we discussed in the second course of this program. Imre, it's Calla & Ivy, a flower store in Amsterdam, is launching her website and is planning a campaign to attract visitors. Her goal is get 10,000 website visits during the month of May. This goal is smart. It is specific and clearly states what they want to achieve. It's measurable. You can track the number of visits to the website with the software they use to create her website. The company already has a physical store, and based on the sales in that store, they're determined that this goal is challenging but achievable. The goal is also relevant. After all, it's the intention to sell products online, so getting more visitors will ultimately help. Lastly, it's time-bound. They have set a deadline for the end of May. Once your goal is clear, it's time to define the KPIs or the key performance indicators. KPIs are measurable values that can help you track your progress towards your goal. KPIs are usually quantitative, meaning they can be measured. They are directional, they go up or down, and they have a direct relationship to your goal. Of course, as a marketing analyst, you will have access to lots of data, but it's important to identify the data that will really help you evaluate whether a goal was achieved. KPIs are the metrics that directly correlate with your business goals. There may be other metrics that are related to the goal, but that don't have a direct effect on the business outcome. We often refer to those as proxy metrics. For instance, in social media, metrics such as likes, comments, and followers are proxies and do not necessarily measure the real impact of advertising on sales. If you want to understand the effect of your advertising on sales, then likes or comments may indicate some level of engagement, but they're not really measuring the success of your ads. It's usually not a good idea to use these types of proxies as KPIs. You want to use metrics that are as closely related to the business outcomes as possible. In other words, you want to focus on metrics that are really indicative of success. In marketing, you'll find that the following metrics often function as KPIs. Reach, website visits, conversions, lift, app events like downloads or in-app purchases, and ad recall. In course 2, we also talked about the distinction between primary and secondary KPIs, where the primary KPI directly measures whether you are on track to reach your goal and the secondary KPI is a metric that directly correlates to your primary KPI but does not fully allow you to confirm that you reached your goal. Note that it's possible for a KPI to be a secondary KPI for a particular goal, but a primary KPI for another one. Here's an example. For Imre's goal, the primary KPI is the number of monthly website visits and a secondary KPI could be the brand awareness for her company, Calla & Ivy. The higher the awareness of the brand, the higher the chances that people will visit her website. But awareness alone won't make her achieve her goal of actually attracting website visits, so awareness is correlated to the number of visits. But it doesn't allow us to conclude the goal has reached, it's a secondary KPI. Of course, if Imre had had a different goal that involved raising the brand recognition of Calla & Ivy, then it would have been possible that brand awareness was a primary KPI. To determine your primary KPI, ask yourself, which metric will let me evaluate without a doubt that we successfully reached our goal? Once you have your goal and KPIs set, it's time to assess your data. Let's look at that in the next video.
