Despite the economic roller coaster we’ve all been riding, marketers remain steadfast in their strategy.  According to a recent study by Forbes Insights, in association with MarketShare Partners, on the topic of measurement and accountability, companies are not cutting back on marketing despite the recent economic roller coaster. Three quarters of marketing executives who responded to the survey noted that they expected their marketing budgets to stay the same or increase in their 2010-2011 fiscal year, with fully one-third expecting an increase.

One of the areas marketers associated with the most important marketing strategy is measurement.  While marketers are not slashing budgets, they do need to provide accountability for their results, and therefore, measurement is more important than ever before.  40% of respondents said one of the biggest drivers for developing marketing measurement and accountability programs was to justify spend to senior executives. 65% wanted to make marketing more strategic within their organization.

Earlier this year, Datran Media conducted its own marketing survey and discovered that marketers and advertising agencies intend to aggressively deploy online measurement tools in order to obtain actionable business intelligence from their marketing campaigns. This trend will accelerate the budget allocation shift into measurable digital channels going forward.

For the majority of marketers surveyed, clicks (72 percent), conversions (59.2 percent) and impressions (58.4 percent) remain the top three metrics that matter. These data points are indicative of a campaign’s overall success, and the survey findings demonstrate that marketers are now fully focused on quantifying their return on investment. 87.2 percent of respondents said that they believed accurate online audience measurement was important for driving increased brand awareness, increased revenue and better campaign performance.

So what does this all mean, and how should marketers use it to their advantage? Is a click measured in email the same as a click measured in a display campaign? How we as an industry understand this data — how we access it, incorporate it, and implement data insights into actionable intelligence — has been a significant stumbling block for interactive. Marketers need to begin incorporating campaign results from all channels and developing a measurement that assesses the value of a marketing message as a whole. This methodology lays the foundation for the next generation of interactive audience measurement and helps you understand how engagement in the email channel, for instance, ties back to a search or social media campaign. When you use data from a variety of sources like search, email, and direct mail, you can more accurately measure audiences and put an actionable plan together for your next outreach.