http://www.brightmetrics.com/blog

Yet I have to wonder how many of these people are basically wasting a lot of their time chasing unproductive ideas and noise. If they were focused on the right ideas, perhaps they would find time to measure what matters, not just what is easy to measure.

Marketing is one of the few silos in the enterprise that has not come under a lot of direct pressure to be productive. Certainly manufacturing had it’s turn, and the end output of CRM seems to have raised productivity in service.

If you talk to recruiters, they are starting to see demand for “accountable” marketers in all kinds of orgs, and especially in senior positions. Perhaps the CFO is indeed knocking on marketing’s door.

If so, perhaps it’s time to look for more than “easy” as the solution.

“Marketers’ familiarity with clicks is only one factor that contributes to its continued usage as the top metric,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Click are easy to count, too, and therefore an inexpensive metric to gather.

“In contrast,” Mr. Hallerman said, “measuring either brand effectiveness or the indirect effects of online ads—such as how display ads contribute to search clicks—is more complex and typically costs more to accomplish that just tallying up clicks.”

Baseball & marketing optimization shared truth: Sum of the parts is NOT greater than the whole. Recent confusion emerges within online metrics community, driven by narrowly defined budget protection interests, fuels attribution debate.

Back to baseball, what makes Albert Pujols great is not the total number of at bats he gets. It’s the industry peer acknowledged impact on significantly enabling his team’s winning percentage. He’s what they call a “game changer” due to his fairly unique ability to contribute across multiple performance categories: batting, fielding, running, & leadership. An ability derived from a daily regimen devoted to understanding success & willingness to methodically test/learn/adapt to the changing competition.

With the continued revenue dominance of paid search vs display & even online vs offline effectiveness being greatly debated, every channel seemingly is reacting as if its a zero sum game. As in baseball, if your team doesn’t have an Albert Pujols, then you’ve already at a disadvantage & likely will experience a losing percentage.

Multi channel attribution modeling is a time consuming & expensive technological undertaking. One that holds all the potential for generating substantial conflict within organizations that have not resolved internal channel revenue recognition.

Given, a marketer’s most crucial resources are time & money, one can arguably question the value of pursuing the development of a truly accurate multi channel attribution model (especially down to the transactional level) relative to the impact on “winning percentage” derived from maximizing other things within their control.

For example, if the proponents of display advertising feel last click attribution is inappropriate for branding campaigns, then why not focus on focus on the solution instead of the problem. Focus on optimizing the creatives to placements to landing page assignments as relevant as possible for your targeted segments. This will enable a higher percentage of the gross impressions served be more effective to actually reaching their intended audience.

Paid search advertising performs more with less simply because it was designed from inception to deliver relevance (clicks) efficiently versus gross tonnage (impressions).
In all fairness to display advertising, the delivery and thus economic revenue model, historically was never designed with transactional efficiency in mind, but rather for massive market reach similar to print and television.

This was all acceptable until the game and the audience evolved.

And, why we have proponents of adapting digital measurement to include gross rating points (GRP’s) methodology in an attempt to hopefully capture offline media spend over to online.

With the arrival of paid search market reach, continued channel fragmentation including the emergence of social networking/mobile empowered consumers, & an crippling economic recession forcing evaluation of spending effectiveness; the game has fundamentally shifted.

As in baseball, when the steroid fueled era of inflated home run totals were found to not cost effectively correlate to winning percentage, the industry adjusted to other more significant determinants of overall winning outcomes.

So, instead of attempting to change the definition of winning percentage or success outcomes, consider we as marketers, vendors, & measurement strategists already possess the tools to make a significant business impact.

Tools & methodology which also do not require the industry to get side tracked with unproductive, time-consuming debates over the merits of having or not having a good multi channel attribution modeling in place before one can improve their individual internet marketing results.

I can’t help but wonder if we are going through a transitional period where the business culture of “gut feel” is being replaced by the business culture of “numbers”, and there are a significant number of “resistors” out there who as you said, end up on the street after a time. If they indeed end up out on the street, perhaps this means the culture is actually changing from the top and there is a process underway.

On the other hand, in the online space the volume of voices supporting some form of mystical gut feel versus actual measurement is so loud – and the resistance to looking at history as a guide so fierce – that I wonder if it can be overcome.

Thanks for your story!

We see this happen in the paid search world as well. We often lose potential business to competitors because when we look at their existing program we see many opportunities to save money but very few to generate more sales by spending more. Not the message they want to hear so they hire someone who says they can press the gas pedal that’s already on the floor to some point below the floor boards.

We also see middle-managers hired into our client’s firm based on the premise that they will double or triple the size of the search program we’re running and do so cost effectively. This usually involves first asking us to do stupid things that cost them huge amounts of money at horrendous return on investment. Second asking us to hide the stupidity with subterfuge, then firing us since we weren’t able to execute what they wanted. Usually we find these folks end up on the street 6 months later, but in the meantime we’ve lost a client…frustrating.

I have worked at some big companies, both as an employee (HSN is a $2 billion operation) and a consultant (Verizon is kinda big) and I have seen the analytical culture work and not work, sometimes in the same company!

HSN was basically a data fist fight – EVERYBODY had analysis so disagreements were often decided by methodology; it was truly a data-driven culture. This is what happens when a minute by minute sales and profits dashboard is on every computer Director level and above, I guess…

What really bothers me in terms of web analytics is this: people will sit around and say they are “not getting any value out of their web analytics investment”. And that could be true = weak analytical talent.

Or it could be that they’re not getting the real story out of their WA investment because everybody is so busy torturing the data to cover their arses that no action is ever taken.

And I just wonder, what % is the former, what % is the latter?

I guess we can only hope that Darwin will take over and the companies who are truly “Competing on Analytics” will survive and the data torturers will not!

This is a great discussion you’ve started–sorry if I’m a little late on the draw. First, I’m a huge fan of your blog, your book, and your work, but I must admit to being surprised at, well, your surprise.

Maybe you haven’t worked for very many large companies?

This sort of thing is positively endemic, and not just in web analytics, but in all aspects of Corporate America, but especially management consulting and Wall Street. At my last job I worked for a very sharp former McKinsey consultant and Harvard MBA, who was new to web analytics, but had many years of data analysis and presentation experience. He was surprised (and delighted) to find that I would actually look at the data first, develop hypotheses, test them, and then prepare presentations with the insights and recommendations.

Why was he surprised? Because he’d never known anyone who actually had done this before. In his experience, the process involved an “understanding” with the client…He’d start with the decision that the client wanted to make, and then “torture” the data to find evidence to justify the decision so that the client could sell this decision internally to employees and externally to the media (and to Wall Street of course). Spin 101.

Speaking of Wall Street, and Wall Street analysts, they (for the most part) rarely do what you would call “real” analysis; instead the analysis is the marketing.

As much as it pains me to say it, in the real world, VERY few large organizations have a true analytical culture, and the higher you go up the org chart (especially if it’s a publicly traded company), IME the less likely any real analysis is done and the more everything becomes a matter of appearances rather than substance.

So I think you’re really touching on a subject that is much bigger than web analytics. It’s about organizational behavior, power, control, and spin.

Another great post. It is crazy to see all of the comments and realize that we are not alone in our struggles. This is always comforting to me. Thank you for providing a place that we can voice our concerns and know that somewhere, someone else is in the same boat.