The industry continues to buzz about the importance of measuring marketing and advertising results and proving out ROI. The recession has heightened marketers’ sense of urgency to show measurable results for their efforts to the point that even the last traditional media loyalists are realizing that they can’t continue without building digital skills.

One of the most powerful features of the Internet is that everything, and I mean everything, can be tracked and reported on including: Ad campaigns, media buys, customer activity, final sales, email opens, Pay-Per-Click results, and even traditional efforts which can be bridged by the Internet and tracked. The ability to track and report at these levels presents tremendous opportunities to develop marketing programs that really work to achieve business goals, rather than just spending budgeted dollars without knowing the true results of the efforts. Analytics serve as the foundation of successful marketing in today’s electronic marketplace allowing the ability to measure, collect, analyze and report on Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing marketing efforts.

For decades, traditional advertising agencies have been compensated for their efforts through fee-based billing models and commission on media buys. Today, the old guard is being challenged by a variety of renumeration models. The biggest factor at play is performance measurement and the desire for clients to pay based on performance. Is performance-based compensation fair to all parties involved?

Digital media has made it much easier to measure marketing efforts. This can be a dream for marketing professionals as more pressure is being put on them to show ROI for the dollars they spend. Because there are so many ways to gather and organize data, it can quickly become an obsession if you’re not careful. Amidst all of the numbers, charts and graphs, sometimes the need for great creative gets overlooked and the brand suffers. This article examines how to observe the basics of good communication design while making it more data-driven and measurable.

We’re seeing a handful of trends surface in response to the growing demand for marketing results:

As mentioned in our main articles this month, the most prominent trend is the increased focus on accountability. It’s becoming less acceptable to enter into marketing initiatives with anything less than well-defined goals and it is expected that the performance of those initiatives will be measured, analyzed and reported.