How marketing data can turn your performance review from stress to success

It’s performance review season again. This is meant to be a time of self-examination and improvement, but for many, it is also a time of great anxiety and stress.

Data-driven marketers can mitigate those negative feelings by approaching their reviews the same way they approach their campaigns. Here are my top three tips for making this season a great and productive one.

Focus on the data

It’s hard to have a productive performance discussion if you feel like your performance was one way while your boss feels it was the other. While we should never underestimate our own feelings or those of others, the way we think we have acted can be very different from the way we actually act. This consistency makes it difficult to draw sound conclusions and align on performance improvement.

To remain objective, we need to bring data into the conversation. That data to be presented, however, needs to be consistent with goals – yours, your boss’s and the business’s.

You’re in good shape if you’ve laid the groundwork for this during last year’s review. If you haven’t already, you may need to make some assumptions. Profitability metrics should always be a win-win for any for-profit organization, but you may not have a direct line of sight to them. At the very least, carefully selecting proxy metrics reflects your desire to align your performance with organizational success.

For example, you can’t manage a P&L, so you can’t speak directly to your financial performance. However, you may have taken on more work this year without adding much value. If your team is doing more work for the same amount of money, that’s a sign of increased profitability. Another possibility is that your media budget was the same or lower than last year, but your conversion volume or rate is increasing. That means you do more with less, which means increased profits.

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Basics, not benchmarks

The saying, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” applies especially to performance reviews. While it’s natural to feel tempted to compare yourself to benchmarks — like getting your 2x ROAS over the organization’s 1.5x average — it can be a double-edged sword. Being ahead of the pack may sound rewarding, but relying on benchmarks alone doesn’t give you the full picture of your performance or areas for growth.

The purpose of your review is to identify opportunities to increase performance. And it is this focus on benchmarks that proves unhelpful for review purposes.

There are three possible outcomes when using benchmarks:

You are above the benchmark

• If you are above the benchmark, is next year’s action to stay where you are? It’s impossible.
• Ideally, your colleagues are improving their performance, so the benchmark should be approaching your performance. Besides, if you’re doing better, shouldn’t you be doing better?

To benchmark

• If you’re playing in the benchmark, you’re with the pack. You are not behind, but there is room to improve your performance.

You are below the benchmark

• If you are below the benchmark, you are behind and need to catch up.

The action item is the same in all three cases: Continue to improve your performance. This is why benchmarks are not very useful in the performance review discussion.

You can also use the basics during performance reviews. Your performance is basic and probably 1x ROAS last year. If you’re at 1.2x this year, while you’re off the benchmark, you’ve improved. As long as you have a continuous pattern of improvement, it shows that you’re getting better — and that’s what performance reviews are all about.

Set your expectations for the coming year

This is the most important part of doing it right. Good planning for the coming year will help you maximize your performance and continue the cycle of improvement.

The first step is to agree with your manager on the metrics, data sources and statistics used to measure your performance. Continuing with the ROAS example, specify which revenue will be considered for you from which data sources. For example, do you get credit for every digital campaign? Campaigns that run a paid community only? And so on.

Once you’ve aligned on these metrics, you need to build your foundation. From those data sources and statistics, how has your performance changed over time? Determine what levers you have and predict how your optimal use of those levers affects metrics.

For example, you may not control budgets (ad spend), but you can control where to allocate that spend, which will affect revenue. We know that ad usage also affects revenue. To distinguish between your performance and the dynamics of ad spend, you need to calculate the relationship.

To prepare for the goals discussion, after seeing your performance over time, predict where your performance should be at the end of this year if all things remain the same. In particular, name things outside of your control and explain how they affect the metrics. Also, specify the key factors that, if changed, have the greatest effects on the metrics.

As mentioned above, the key factors in monetization may be media mix, platform selection and overall budget. To make a clear difference between your performance and underspending, set clear expectations with your manager. Explain that if the budget goes down too much, it may look like your performance has gone down, even though it’s not entirely your fault.

Finally, it’s time to compare notes with your boss. They might give you a target for next year, like 2.5x ROAS. The most important question to ask whenever you are presented with a number like this is: How did you calculate that number? The answer to that question is important.

If the number is the result of an in-depth analysis of expected budgets, market forecasts, expected employment and more, this is great. It means that more time is devoted to coming up with the right expectations for your performance. However, in my experience, this is rare.

Instead, it’s usually either your boss thinks you should do better than this year or that money says this is an indication that the numbers are working in the finance office. Both are good ways to run a business, but they may not be the right ways to evaluate your performance. If you are in this situation, you need to check if this target is possible.

For example, a former boss once tasked me with growing my profitable analytics department from 80 to 500 analysts within five years, all while maintaining profitability. During the meeting, I was speechless — I didn’t know how to respond. My mind was going in a million directions, trying to form a coherent response to what was a strange request.

Can the labor market even supply 420 analysts within five years? How were we going to train them? How were we going to pay them? Where will all this money come from and how can we raise it while focusing on growing the team?

In the end, I left the meeting without talking about the project more than acknowledging it and came back a week later with about a 40-slide response to the project. In the end, the request didn’t happen to anyone in my position – well done or otherwise. The question asked in response was, “Well, what would be reasonable?” That’s what you want to achieve when you partner with your manager on performance goals.

Performance reviews are tricky to get right, but in the hands of two data-driven experts, you can set great goals and activate a continuous improvement loop during this important time of year.

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