Lately I’ve been wondering how prescient Shakespeare was in potentially describing the 21st century world of marketing metrics. Our industry’s recent drive to turbocharge marketing measurement of just about everything and ascribe interpretative meaning to it all is seen alternatively as somewhere between “well-intended but off base” and “absolutely necessary.”
Perhaps. But as with many efforts the consequences of it all looms to create a new problem. We are drowning in data—literally. We both measure more and evaluate far more data than ever before but we know less. Worse, what we know is relevant to increasingly more narrow slivers within our profession. The topper to this is we are the one’s accountable for this ever-expanding murkiness of about what ‘is” and what “is not” in the world of marketing metrics. Too many measures emit a feel that they have been created with limited care, forethought and numeric sophistication about what benefit it is meant to provide. In fact, I have isolated three factors that I believe largely fuel this situation.
Lack of Standardization
What is the single most important indicator of web-site performance for your company? Volume? Page Views? A proprietary page grader? A hybrid measure that mashes a bunch of data into one number? Yeah, I don’t know either. Little is agreed upon about what data matter most or at least universal standards that matter to all. Can you imagine the media buyer’s world without “cost per thousand” or the broadcaster’s world without “Nielsen ratings?” I can’t either—those are standards that allow for commerce to flow in those sectors of the marketing industry. But too few, newer sectors don’t have a “go to” set of measures that most of us hold to be significant. So in this vacuum we create whatever we think works for us at one point in time only for our situation. Its applicability is limited and the number of different data metrics soars.
Lack of Basic Skill
Wonderful advances in digital technology have dramatically lowered both the cost and effort in collecting, tabulating and analyzing data in the first place. This has given new, broad swaths of marketing professionals hands-on access and responsibility to the data world. That’s good.
But living in that world still requires some fundamental understanding of data analysis, inferential statistics, sampling and other factors. Too few would-be “analysts” seemingly lack this or worse, commit the cardinal sin of building a data-supported reality on too few indicators or conclusions. That’s bad—and its practice drenches our already soaked data ground with more numbers.
The Belief that any question can be answered in a poll
This is perhaps the most severe folly our profession has sometimes pursued. Polls are wonderful things and by their very nature allow us to gain valuable insight into a wide variety of relevant issues. But even beyond some of the basic points listed above we routinely ignore one of the most fundamental characteristics of polling.
The mere nature or point of a poll in the first place is to measure people’s opinions or attitudes. But too frequently polls are interpreted and portrayed as would-be behavior. This is a significant gaffe that leads many to “over” interpret how the subjects of a poll will behave and then to apply that knowledge myriad ways. Worse, it goes to the heart of what has been the focus of many social science disciplines for eons—the difference in people’s stated intent versus actual behavior.
Results on that topic are abundant and their place in the marketing world is just as assured as in politics, religion, love or any other facet of life. In fact to measure the would-be behavior of marketing audiences it’s likely that other research techniques are more suitable. (For instance the Consumer Package Goods industry has refined, more “laboratory” type approaches that measure this.) But too frequently we overreach and ascribe far too much understanding based on ill-fitting data to a situation than is warranted.
A sharp-step back from all of these practices is needed. The digital world has opened the proverbial Genie’s lamp on much about metrics and likely assures struggles will long exist about their appropriate and timely use. But we don’t have to be the perpetrators in all of this. Remember it was Caesar who suffered from Cassius’ complicity—never knowing if the fault was in the stars or not. We know and should live with metrics accordingly.
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John Durante is marketing services director for WordWrite Communications.
