Why marketers struggle with analytics
Fellow marketer: lend me your ears and imagine this. It’s the low season: website sales are down, traffic is at a flat-line, and ad budgets maximised. We’re reacting by testing and tweaking, but can’t prove our actions are impacting anything. Whether it’s the boss or the client, someone is breathing down our neck for an explanation. Sounds familiar?
Welcome to the Post-Hoc Fallacy (It’s Science!)
It’s often when we hit this low point that we slowly turn to the dreaded reporting software to trudge down the data mine and try and make heads or tails of it all.
It’s curious to me that we turn to data after the fact, when we shouldn’t have been in this position to begin with. The biggest risk of doing this is that we can arrive at the wrong conclusions. Often referred to as the post-hoc fallacy by psychologists, this phenomenon means that our brains often retrofit logical explanations onto past events so that we can make sense of the present. In short, if we’re looking for a justification of a mistake, that’s all we’re going to see. What’s more, the campaign is over so any insights we find are not going to impact anything.
Our digital marketing activities require planning, and if we integrate looking at our various analytics for marketing inspiration into those early stages, we would have probably unearthed useful knowledge — hidden in the data that our tools are automatically accumulating over the years — that could have helped us see an opportunity to leverage.
What’s the busiest traffic juncture in the world?
Being a digital marketer in 2015 feels a bit like being at the centre of The Magic Roundabout, UK. You have traffic coming from all directions, technology clashing with business demands, and pressure to be creative in the midst of all the noise.
We also happen to live in a world in which we must use limited resources to simultaneously run acquisition, engagement and advertising efforts across the six major digital channels, all of which generate even MORE data of different types:
- Web: Data about who is visiting our website, how often, from where, what content they’re consuming, amount of comments on blog posts, number of downloads, amounts of leads or sales etc..
- Search: Data about which keywords people use, or which links on other sites sent people to us, crawl data, ranking information etc…
- Social: Data from a zillion social platforms and apps including the big three (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin). Number of followers, engagement, clicks, retweets, pins, reblogs, etc…
- Email: Data about which emails are being opened, which links are being clicked, by who, at what time, and from where
- Mobile: Usage and behavioural information about our app, or how people interact with our site via mobile
- Paid: All information about advertising effectiveness (display or pay per click) — impressions, CTR, etc…
Talk about a challenge! Just by doing marketing, we generate thousands of new rows of data every day. Even if we manage to capture it and analyse it (a herculean task), we still need to transform the mountains of knowledge from all these channels into wisdom that changes behaviour and actually impacts what happens from day to day inside the organisation. This means that right now, in order to do analysis, we have to stop doing marketing.
You can’t force a ball into a square box
Can we be blamed for this? Not all digital marketers are analytics experts, nor should they be. Marketers excel at design, content creation, and coming up with amazing looking campaigns and digital experiences. We come alive when brainstorming ideas, planning and research, engaging with customers through content.
Marketing is the creative, sexy part of the business. Digital Marketing is Don Draper, not Harry Crane. Yet a lot of Drapers feel they’re being pushed to handle data analytics as well, just to survive in their job. And for most creatives, that remains against their natural order of things.
So: what’s the ideal reality?
This is the part where I dream.
To make the most out of digital, I believe that every marketing team should have an Analytics specialist to assist them. Yet most small businesses don’t have one of those. Maybe it’s down to lack of funds to hire one, but it’s more likely that there still exists a lack of awareness or appreciation of exactly how much data empowers digital marketers to be better at their job. In any case, we’re still extremely far away from my ideal version of reality. Most marketers have to deal with crisis after crisis by forcing on their analyst hat when they absolutely have no other choice, and doing the best with what Analytics skills they slowly acquire by trial and error over the years.
Analytics and creativity don’t have to be at odds. Data, when properly collected, questioned and interpreted, can act as a powerful source of action and inspiration. The only other option is digital marketing that driven by gut feelings and dogma, and if we want our business to survive against the competition, is that really a choice?
