SapientNitro, is part of Sapient, is an integrated marketing and technology services firm. It creates and engineers highly relevant experiences that accelerate business growth and fuel brand advocacy for its clients. By combining multi-channel marketing, multi-channel commerce, and the technology that binds them, it influences customer behavior across the spectrum of content, communication and commerce channels, resulting in deeper, more meaningful relationships between customers and brands.

The truth has long dawned upon us. Technology has spurred an explosion of digital channels that have completely disrupted the way organizations interact with their customers. This digital trend that began in the west, has rapidly reached the shores of developing nations. Be it with the thought “Digital is the new future, we want to explore the enormous opportunity that lies within” or “Our competition and everyone else is going digital, so we better not slack”, a vast majority of corporations have already laid their stake in the digital ground in one capacity or the other. Corporate web sites (with/without e-commerce), social communities (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), email marketing, display advertising, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing are a few examples of such digital endeavors. Even though some of these channels are previously unchartered territories (especially in the Indian sub-continent) smart CMO’s have realized that one size does not need to fit all - remember TV ads. Properly distilled, these channels have a huge upsell potential either in terms of revenues or brand value. There is no such thing as a free lunch and investments in digital marketing can/will be significant and ongoing. Which marketing campaign is working and which is not? Is my newly appointed Search Director delivering his salary’s worth? What is the buzz around my brand? How do I distribute my marketing budget amongst various channels? These and many more such questions together summarize the dilemma of a CMO in the digital world. The purpose of this article is to purely slice the tip of this iceberg and offer five effective tips to equip digital decision makers with the right ingredients to measure and optimize the ROI on their digital spend.

Tip 1 – A Robust Analytics Enablement Framework.

What exactly does this mean? As far as measurement is concerned, "What you implement is what you get". Simple enough, no magic. This means that all your digital assets need to be properly tagged so that data that is collected downstream can be relevantly categorized to provide meaningful information. Consider the following two examples:

* As far as your web sites are concerned, every single page needs to have the relevant standard tracking code in place so that visitor behavior can be analyzed.