How to Reduce Confusion and Drive Results with a Marketing Source of Truth

Think of all the different locations and dashboards you have to check to assess your marketing performance on a regular basis. If yours is like many companies, you might have to compile data from individual social media platforms, spreadsheet exports, Google Analytics, and other analytics tools. Not only does this fragmented process make it difficult to assess the overall performance of your brand across multiple platforms, but it inhibits you from establishing one source of truth for making important marketing decisions.

Rockerbox makes it easy to centralize data from all your platforms and analyze it within our platform or in your data warehouse. Read on for a roadmap to establishing a marketing source of truth and using it to set benchmarks, make spend decisions, understand ROAS, and more.

Marketing Source of Truth vs. Disparate Channels

When it comes to marketing channel metrics, the simple question of how well you’re performing against your goals isn’t so simple when different channels and platforms give you different answers.

Google Analytics may say one thing, while individual platforms may paint a different picture—and neither of those may match up with your analytics platforms. When you have this level of inconsistency between your different sources of marketing performance, it becomes difficult if not impossible to set realistic benchmarks for your channels that you can then use to monitor success.

Google Analytics Inaccuracies

While Google Analytics is a widely used platform for web analytics, it’s far from perfect in terms of data accuracy, which can make it difficult for companies that want to use it as a source of truth. The introduction of GA4 was designed to offer more granular insights into the user journey across devices and platforms, but it’s not without its flaws.

Some other challenges that brands have found with GA4 that make it difficult to rely on it as a source of truth include:

Attribution: GA4’s approach to attribution has raised eyebrows. The platform’s difficulties with consistent UTMs, automatic source recognition, and attribution refresh rates complicate the analysis. For instance, the conversion attribution can shift dramatically over a week, with significant impacts on understanding marketing performance. Additionally, GA4 is unable to track a number of important marketing areas, including views from walled garden platforms, linear TV, OTT, direct mail, post purchase surveys, and spend.
Reporting Identity: GA4 struggles with stitching together a cohesive identity graph, impacting data analysis. The blended method of reporting has shown to produce less reliable outcomes than device-based methods.
Cardinality: The handling of datasets with a high number of unique values is a known issue in GA4, often resulting in data being grouped into an 'Other' category, which can be particularly problematic for businesses with a large number of SKUs.

Individual Platforms vs. Analytics Tools

If you’re familiar with marketing analytics tools, you’ve likely noticed the discrepancies between the results that individual channels like Facebook and TikTok report on their own platforms and your cross-channel analytics platforms. The most notable difference is often the conversion counts and the number of conversions that a platform takes credit for.

The issue of duplicate conversions and inflated credit is a common one and occurs because individual platforms do not have a way to see data from other channels that may have impacted a conversion and often take credit for more than their fair share. Unfortunately the issues with accurate conversion counts also affect other metrics like CPA and ROAS, which makes individual platforms unfit for setting benchmarks and acting as a source of truth across your marketing strategy.

Establishing a Marketing Source of Truth with Rockerbox

When Google Analytics, individual platforms, and other third-party platforms fail to give you a reliable source of truth, it’s time for a change. With Rockerbox, you can access the marketing source of truth you need to help you answer questions like:

How do I set benchmarks per channel based on past performance?
Where and how much should I spend my marketing budget for the best results?
What’s my estimated return on investment based on spend changes?
How does performance differ between Rockerbox and individual platforms?

Here’s our roadmap to set up a marketing source of truth for your company.

Step 1: Centralize Key Data Points

Before analyzing and setting benchmarks for your marketing strategy, you need to first pull together all the necessary data from your various marketing channels, including:

Search
Social
TV/OTT
Affiliate
Direct mail
And other channels

With Rockerbox Track and Collect, you can get all the necessary datasets and touchpoints you need to start analyzing the impact of your marketing.

Step 2: Set Reliable Benchmarks

Rockerbox allows you to set deduplicated baseline metrics for CPA and ROAS whether that’s on a channel or tactic level. Using the Cross-Channel Attribution report, you can view performance for all your channels and tactics and select the right control period for metrics. When making your selection, make sure to pick a time range that didn’t include any large changes to the marketing mix or spend.

Once you have channel/tactic benchmarks, you can start optimizing and budgeting against their performance. For example you can: