How Useful is Your Data? The Importance of Granularity
Many companies have the practice of using marketing mix analysis. This approach seeks to understand the impact of various types of marketing activities (for example, digital media, speaker programs, journal ads, etc.) in order to recommended spend levels for each. While this can provide some useful insights, the guidance lacks specificity. Detailed information that can inform immediate action is far more valuable than this broad-spectrum approach—especially in pharmaceutical marketing. Increased data granularity that leads to immediately actionable insights makes your marketing more efficient and effective.
What is Data Granularity?
Data granularity is the level of detail considered in a model or decision making process or represented in an analysis report. The greater the granularity, the deeper the level of detail. Increased granularity can help you drill down on the details of each marketing channel and assess its efficacy, efficiency, and overall ROI.
For the pharma industry, knowing which marketing channels work for each brand segment or even HCP is far more informative than knowing what’s working for the company as a whole. Increased granularity can help you examine each brand’s performance and make specific, targeted adjustments to discrete variables to improve sales and profitability. Rather than using a shotgun approach, increasing data granularity allows you to focus your marketing with laser-scope precision.
What is Immediately Actionable Data?
Having too much of the wrong data is just as bad as not having access to the data you need. If your measurement company uses rigorous measurement and insights to track and analyze data but fail to provide actionable insights, the overall effort will be of little value to your company. Immediately actionable data is information that gives enough specificity and insight that the actions that should be taken become clear to decision makers.
For example:
- A pharma company was spending more than $4M annually on paid search
- A specific search engine was identified as an outlier with a $1,111/conversion as compared to higher performing search engines averaging $366/conversion
- The recommendation was to remove this outlier search engine, which would only reduce conversion activities by 3% but create a $920K or 23% budget savings
Improve Your Efficacy and Efficiency by Increasing Data Granularity
Increased data granularity helps you use your data to develop strategies and take concrete action. A strategic measurement partner like Measurement Mojo can deliver tactic-level insights so each brand knows what marketing tactics to stop, start, and continue and what channels to pursue, abandon, or nurture. When paired with test-control design and rigorous measurement insights, these kinds of analyses can help brands determine their optimal channel spend and improve their overall campaign performance. Contact us today to find out how we can help you measure your data more accurately and learn to understand exactly what it’s telling you to do.