Marketing Analytics, Analysis, and Recommendations
What is AAR
AAR or Analytics, Analysis, Recommendation, is a process that aids in iterative improvement of a product or strategy. This doesn’t have to be used just for marketing, but for any area of business that needs improving.
Why You Should Being AAR’ing
Alone, raw numbers don’t tell us much. Analysis helps us derive meaning from the numbers. We aggregate data and identify similarities, differences, and relationships between our results. Recommendations come in the form of the 6 C’s:
Complete
Correct
Clear
Concise
Consistent
Compliant
When one or more of these areas are lacking, it’s best to identify what a team should start doing, stop doing, and do more of. This typically involves a different mix of the 4 P’s.
How to Visually Display AAR
The way I display AAR is through a Sprint Analysis Workbook (SAW). A sprint is a two week period, which is the time frame that each portion of the workbook goes over. This allows time for adjustments to be made and processed, but is short enough to adjust strategy if need be.
Hockey SAW
Here’s an example of a SAW I made for WWU Ice Hockey. While time consuming, it gave me valuable insights into how our content changes improved our engagement and ultimately helped us achieve our marketing and communication goals.
What Kind of Analytics?
This is the backbone of your AAR process. Without analytics, and proper ones at that, your analysis and recommendations will be insufficient. The analytics you collect should depend on the portion of the marketing funnel you are trying to optimize. There are two different kinds of measurements you can collect, Active and Passive.
Passive Measures are an indirect measure of a communication objective, while Active Measures are direct measures of a communication objective. While active measures will give you more accurate data to go off of, they’re often costly to conduct both in terms of time and money. This is why passive measures are used more often.
As I mentioned in my blog about Message Strategy Methods, each objective of the marketing funnel has its own method to facilitate a user’s journey. Likewise, each stage of the funnel also has its own analytics that you collect.
Awareness
Indirect Measurement
Reach
Frequency
Impressions
Direct Measurement
Aided Recall Test
Knowledge
Indirect Measurement
Click-Through Rate
Scroll Depth
Bounce Rate
Drop Rate
Direct Measurement
Knowledge Test
Liking
Indirect Measurement
Likes
Positive Comments
Shares
Repeat Visits
Direct Measurement
Liking Test
Preference
Indirect
Subscription
Shares
Positive Comment
Direct
Net promoter score
Trial
Indirect
Subscription
Direct
Conversion Rate
Purchase
Indirect
Subscription
Direct
Conversion Rate
Conclusion
It’s up to your organization’s goals to decide what your analysis tells you to improve. If you’re going to take away one thing from this blog, it’s that you need to pay attention to your results. Making small changes can snowball over time. AAR is a continuous process and if practiced diligently, WILL have a positive impact on your organization.
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