Worked on a project auditing an e-commerce brand data and tech which led to planning how to spend 10% of marketing budget into data and tech. The CFO was heavily involved in taking ownership of the data strategy.
Being a medium sized e-commerce brand who were on the path to accelerating their growth it requires working with partners in all areas of data and tech. This process allowed the CFO to be involved from an early stage to shape and implement the right the data strategy. The CFO had previously worked at larger brands with high 8 figure revenues made it easier to implement data and tech, which also created its challenges. Now with considerably lower revenues and % of budget of data and tech smaller it requires a different approach to ensure value is provided.
With it being early stages for the e-commerce brand with no ‘data’ owner in place, it made sense for the CFO to take ownership. With the recommended changes it’s likely to have a significant impact across the business in a positive manner for the CFO to take ownership provides more credibility.
The data and tech investment
Looking at where the 10% is going into data and tech, the investment should drive a positive impact across the wider business not only marketing with the right culture and use of data.
Summary of the data and tech investment:
- Server Side Tracking – provides more trust in data + more data to drive better digital campaign performance
- Data Warehouse – proving a single source of truth across multiple data sources of business and marketing performance
- Brand Tracking – understand the health of the brand
- Econometrics – provide a strategic view on performance and how to best optimise the marketing mix to deliver against business goals
One of the areas of investment that was explored was Google 360. The cost of Google 360 would have been larger than any of the individual data and tech investments. What was not as attractive was the payback for Google 360 was calculated as 17 months, ultimately decided against investing into Google 360 at this current stage.
To quote the CFO when asked how to best summarise the 10% investment: “better data + richer insights = growth”
The big win comes from marketing and finance working together and driving forward the data strategy initiative which has been driven by the Marketing Director but also the CFO who was willing to understand the intricacies how the 10% is going to be invested and the value it will provide. The one area of focus for the CFO in giving the 10% investment was about growing baseline revenue. The investment into data and tech is not standalone it supports the CFO wider goal in growing the brand and the business.
Growing baseline to justify investment
One of the long term goals is growing baseline revenue which means growing the brand. Growing the brand means higher % of baseline (organic) revenue with growing brand awareness and higher profit margins which comes from:
- Earning the trust from a customer they make multiple purchases without the need to ‘show ads’ to them
- Customers visit the website organically via organic search / social or direct
- Customers are not reliant on any form of discounts, likely to wait for the product (if any delays)
Baseline revenue has doubled since 2019 accounting for max 10% at the end of 2024 which is looking at revenue coming from organic search traffic to the homepage using Google Analytics. With no real measurement in place, it’s a good guideline to understand what the baseline is. The growth in baseline revenue correlates to the changes within the business mainly increase in prices which has had a positive impact which is seen in the growth of baseline revenue.
Also understanding what the baseline of brand interest is, how does brand awareness show up. Which is looking at year on year changes using branded search data from 2019 to 2024. At the end of 2024 v 2019 branded search volume was at -5%.
Understanding baseline revenue and baseline brand interest become key metrics to continually measure performance to understand the impact.
CFO taking ownership of data strategy
With the CFO leading the data strategy they will be able to:
- Implement the data strategy from the board level down: will help when it comes to selling the vision into the wider business. In many cases the data strategy gets implemented someone with less authority as a bottom up approach making it harder to get buy-in with the right investment.
- Being able to connect the dots between different teams within the business ensuring the data is not siloed to driving richer insights
- Driving financial value: from being the holder of the P&L, budgets etc the CFO has an invested interest in driving the data strategy. Ensuring the right data is available to answer key business questions and drive strategic decision making that align to the long term objectives. Which should improve the financial performance of the business
Focus on the key areas:
- Evaluate the plan and data requirements: Understanding the business challenges today with the long term business objective and data requirements is the first step to mapping out the data strategy to assigning budget to it and implementation of the data strategy
- Developing KPI Framework: Building out KPI’s that align with the business objectives to monitor and track performance which becomes the bedrock
- Build strong data foundations: Once the decision has been made on what data is needed which is the most important. Understanding the current tech in place will help with deciding which technology is best suited to deliver against the business requirements. Not the most exciting area of data but the management and process of data underpins the data collection, consistency and reliability of data impacts the analysis
Having the right data strategy in place, there will be many short term and medium term wins, but the big win will come in the long term.
