Marketing

This main topic covers cross-channel marketing control — the layer above the individual disciplines. While SEO, SEA or social each optimise a single channel, this is about how all these channels work together and how you measure their contribution to the business result. Three connected tasks sit at the centre: measurement (which euro delivers what?), attribution (which channel do you credit a conversion to?) and profitability (is the effort worth it?).

KPIs and profitability

Higher-level marketing KPIs look at the full picture instead of single-channel metrics. ROI and MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio) relate revenue to total cost — unlike channel-specific values such as ROAS. CAC measures what a new customer costs you, LTV/CLV the value that customer brings over the whole relationship. Only the ratio of LTV to CAC shows whether growth is sustainable. AOV (average order value), contribution margin and share of search/voice round out the picture with profitability and market share. These KPIs are the shared language in which channels become comparable.

Attribution, programmatic and tracking

Attribution answers which touchpoint earned a conversion. Classic MTA (multi-touch attribution) follows individual user journeys but runs into limits due to privacy. MMM (marketing mix modeling) instead works statistically on aggregated data and needs no personal cookies. Unified Marketing Measurement combines both approaches into a cross-channel effect analysis — the most robust route today.

Programmatic advertising automates the buying of ad inventory in real time via a stack of DSP (demand-side platform), SSP (supply-side platform) and DMP (data management platform). Tracking is the data foundation for all of this — and in upheaval: with the end of third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox and a cookieless future, the focus shifts to first-party data and server-side tracking via the Conversion API.

What you’ll find on this page

Below you’ll find a topic world around marketing: current news on measurement, tracking and advertising markets, blog articles with background and practice, lexicon articles for deeper insight and a glossary of the most important terms. Use the filters above to jump straight to a sub-topic — from KPIs through attribution and programmatic to tracking in the cookieless era.