I know half my marketing works...I still don't know which half!

 

By: Keith Browning

One of the biggest advantages of Digital Marketing is our ability to measure it, we are told. The great mystery of marketing has finally been removed. The famous mantra, “I know half my marketing works, I just don’t know which half” no longer applies. With digital, you can measure everything.

Or so we're told.

The customer path to purchase today is longer and more complex than ever before. Add to this the fact that the vast majority of organisations will engage in not one but multiple forms of marketing at any one time and you can already see the challenge. Integrated campaigns usually employ many different types of marketing and promotion at any one time - from social media and banner ads to video and PPC. This gets all the more complicated when offline elements are added to the mix, like TV, Radio and Print.

Too often, organisations will simply credit the 'last click' as the reason for their marketing success. If a PPC advert brought the customer to the site and the customer then converted, the answer is 'obvious'. We must then allocate more budget to our PPC campaign - a key fallacy. Does the fact that 500 people arrived on our website and converted as a result of clicking on our PPC advert really tell us a whole lot about the effectiveness of our marketing? The same applies for first click attribution or lateral click or any of the usual measurements an organisation typically applies.

I'm a big fan of Ted Baker and rarely buy clothes from anywhere else. I often purchase from their website, in fact it's been less than a week since I've done so. Last time I purchased, I went via an organic search on Google and the time before it was a PPC ad. Of course, the PPC ad hadn't influenced me in any way nor created any demand. It's the brand that I love, built up over many years. I sometimes wonder if there is a digital marketing executive in Ted Baker analysing my purchases right now and trying to persuade everyone on the team that they should stop spending so much on branding and other 'fluffy' stuff and start putting more in to their PPC budget. I hope not!

The question I pose is have we really moved on all that much from not knowing which half of our marketing works and which doesn't?

Don't get me wrong, the data available to us can certainly better inform us when it comes to marketing spend. But beware - any one of these metrics only tell a small part of the story.

We're dealing with human behaviour and people are influenced in many different ways. For a true analysis, we need to look much further than Google Analytics.