As Day 1 wrapped up at SES NY 2012, there were several themes that ran throughout the event. Within the pre-prepared conference speeches centered on search engine optimization, local search and social marketing strategies – much of the tone was set by the willingness to explore and refute common analytical practices.
Access to deep analytics makes several marketers ‘numbers happy’. The more numbers they see, the more they circulate amongst themselves and clients. These numbers work both for and against implementing or maintaining different marketing strategies – whether this decision is misguided or even pre-determined. At the end of the day, analytics can be spun several ways, thus basing your marketing ROI off these numbers alone, only presents a partial picture. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then a snapshot of your analytics profile can tell you 2,000 different stories depending on what you’re looking at. Many times, showing portions of an analysis causes businesses and agencies to do things they don’t fully understand.
The concept of ‘stupid reporting’ came up on a number of occasions. Reporting is always a hot topic, as many agencies feel they spend entirely too much contracted time reporting the work and not enough time getting to do it. Stupid reporting in general deals with metrics that really don’t matter. While something can be said for the brand power many feel they get when they have 500,000 likes – it’s an empty measure. Marketers have become all too comfortable with reporting on things such as Facebook likes, tweet frequency, and other quantitative measures that are really only a corner-piece to the puzzle. This data ranges from somewhat impactful to not at all.
Much of this can be traced back to client interaction and marketers giving into client demands for more Facebook likes, more post impressions than their competitors, etc. It’s giving into this desire that has been the problem for many. Instead of taking the request in context and for what it’s worth – somewhere along the way, digital marketers have become comfortable with considering these worthy metrics.
So what does matter? Many ROI focused direct response agencies will swear that the conversions and where they come from are the only things that do. Budgets for many, stop and start on the conversion data that analytics software gives us. The problem with this sort of tracking is that it’s very one sided. Keynote speaker Avinash Kaushik compared this to picking up someone in a bar. ‘Not everyone will go home with you the first night. I mean, maybe they will, then lucky you. Sometimes you have to take them on 3 or even 4 dates before they go home with you’. The reality is that most people will not convert on the first visit. They also will not reach your site by the same means at all times.
Take a billboard for instance – You construct a billboard in a busy part of the city and allocate a landing page just for that – a sure fire way to measure its effectiveness, right? Many will look at the numbers at the end of the service period, maybe see a lackluster amount of conversions from that particular landing page, determine that it brought no real worth, and decide to pull it. But what happens to all the people that saw the billboard and then searched for you online? That clicked a branded ad, or a branded organic search term? What if they found you on social media afterwards before finally converting? How many steps existed between the user and the conversion, and what were they?
The issue at hand is not giving credit where credit is due. Instead of asking if that billboard converted, we have to ask ourselves if the signage can properly be identified as a vital step in the conversion process. Simply chalking it up to an organic or social lead is easy to do, but often misguided. Identifying the full user experience is the priority of a marketing agency. Digital marketing boats the ability to easily pull anwers to who, why, when, what, and where, but as we all know – partial answers often lead to full mistakes.
With a heavy reliance on analytics and the acceptance of the data at face value, the disconnect with these basic advertising principles can be a shortfall of digital marketing if allowed to become so – As an industry that so perfectly blends digital innovation and marketing, at times, the technical aspects of the tasks become more important than the primary objective – marketing. For instance, a search engine optimization campaign cannot stop at someone that simply knows how to get you to the first page of Google. They’re a part of a team, and should be under the umbrella of a person or agency that understands how to build and maintain brands. SEO is a form of lead generation. Lead generation in of itself is not your marketing strategy. In the same vain, its important to properly identify conversion paths and not to make analytics more than what it is.
So where does this leave us? It asks us to really understand user experience. Instead of measuring Facebook likes and post impressions, let’s measure the interactions instead. How many were likes? How many were comments and how do we value this differently? How many different people interacted with the brand and how did this affect their future interaction and willingness to convert? These are not easy measurements to display which may be part of the apprehension to move towards this model. These figures don’t easily present themselves in a number format at the end of the month in an excel file, but are important to display as they are significant to the brand and the overall value that’s been added to it.
At the end of the day, let’s not just focus on the amount of conversions you have from a particular source, but let’s look at the value that you’ve added to your business because of a specific marketing tactic. Being analytical doesn’t mean looking at summary data and making judgment calls on what’s working and what’s not, but it means statistically analyzing your data to determine where real value lies.
