Measuring marketing ROI: tips for international teams and websites

For a multi-national organization – or any large business enterprise with teams in different countries and regional websites – it’s important to be able to consolidate activities and website performance across those regions into a single, holistic view for effective marketing ROI measurement.

Disconnected activities across an organization’s international teams in respects to marketing and sales activity will make it incredibly difficult for regional and international marketing and sales directors to understand how their websites are performing overall. Even more so when regional marketing and sales teams have developed their own processes and use a different tool set to one and other for reporting.

At a minimum, global organizations need to be able to report on their overall global position, including regional breakdowns for each international team. Then, within each region, they must be able to report on the performance of country-specific websites – even if they are in different languages.

The problem in achieving such reporting, however, often comes down to the fact that regional websites will all be managed, run and updated by different marketing departments. These departments might not necessarily be using the same processes to track, measure and report on marketing activity and may even be focusing on entirely different goals.

Another issue is that, for regional marketing teams, they might be using different tracking codes or tags for marketing campaigns, making it incredibly difficult to get an overall view of marketing performance across each region. Making measuring marketing ROI a major challenge.

Do you see the problem?

With all these individual websites being operated by dedicated marketing departments, who may or may not be using different tools to track, measure, and report activity, it can very quickly become confusing and the accuracy of your reporting will be impacted.

Therefore, to avoid incorrect measuring, duplication, and inaccuracy, focus on implementing a series of standard processes and tools across every region worldwide. Make it abundantly clear to your regional department managers that you want to do all of the following:

1. House all of your websites and their activity under one analytics platform;
2. Measure specific KPIs and, where possible, goals and conversions;
3. Assign the responsibility of the reporting in that platform to a team in each department.

By organizing your websites in such a way, it will allow you to get a high-level view of your organization’s marketing performance globally, as well as allow you to delve into the individual regions and websites for more forensic assessment and measuring marketing ROI.

For example, with Google Analytics, you can house all of your sites on the platform, allocate a singular tracking code/tag to each website and their campaigns, and then utilize advanced filters to evaluate individual sites. By doing this, you have the ability to then break down your traffic by region or source, and create customized reports to deliver information on particular metrics relevant to your organization.

For more complex requirements, you may require a more advanced reporting tool, such as Google Analytics 360 Suite.

By using a singular platform for the data management segment of your organization’s reporting, you can quickly pull in data from multiple places, build reports that are easy to manage, alter and populate, and comfortably export reports with all the information that is needed to make an informed assessment.

The idea is that you consolidate your marketing activity and unify your processes across marketing departments – regional or not. As you begin to implement these processes measuring marketing ROI will be straightforward. You will be able to clearly see, over time, the return on investment of your organization’s international marketing activity across every region.

If you want help with your international reporting for your marketing teams or advice on how to consolidate your processes to ensure consistency across your activities, we can help. Click here and find out more about our analytics services and how we can help your business.