Digital Marketing Insights: Why Your Marketing Reports are Useless

You're listening to Digital Marketing Mondays. Each week we bring you new and exciting content from around the marketing industry and help give you, the marketer, insights into what's happening. We'll offer our advice and share some takeaways to help you develop better strategies for your marketing. Ideally, this will also help you improve your ROI as well. So with that, let's tune into this week's episode.

So how you doing, Devin? I got a thought for today. Have you got anything in mind?

Yeah, I think talking about data and particularly insights that companies may or may not receive from their marketing department or their vendors, probably a good thing to talk about. Yeah.

So let's dive into that. That's what I was thinking. So I wanted to start with a famous quote. There was a merchant and/or industrialist named John Wanamaker. In the 1800s, he was a retail merchant, and he had a famous quote which has been also attributed to someone from England. And basically it goes like this: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half." And famous quote.

I love it.

Famous quote. And it's an interesting one because it's still difficult. I mean, digital marketing has definitely made it easier for us to figure out which part of our advertising is working. But there's a lot of ways that things can go wrong. And I wanted to talk about one particular way today. And to set the table for you, I'll tell you a little story that seems to have repeated itself multiple times during my career. And that's when I'm sitting down with a prospect who may or may not already be doing digital marketing. Perhaps they're doing running ads on Google and Facebook and so forth, and they've got an agency helping them, but things aren't going as well as they should be. So they called me in for a meeting. And sit down from them across the table. And we're talking about the various things that they're doing. And at some point they go, hey, would you like to see the monthly report that we get from our agency? And I go, sure. So they push this sort of 15 or 20-page stack of paper across the table to me. And I look at it and it's just a bunch of data, really. And I say to them, so is this helpful to you? Do you know what this means? And they go, well, actually, no, we don't know what any of it means. And we were hoping you could explain it to us, right? And I go, well, I can explain some of it to you, but a lot of this is just really down to data around individual keywords and stuff like that. It's just kind of meaningless to you. It's important, I guess, if you're doing the ads yourself, but since you're outsourcing this, what you really want to know is what's working, what's not working, what are the insights from this? Am I attracting the right kinds of traffic or am I attracting people that are probably not my target audience? And am I putting the people in front of the right messaging? There's a lot of ways that digital marketing can go off the rails, and your data can tell you that if you have the right data. First of all, it has to be accurate, right? If you're making a mistake in the way things were set up and your data isn't good, then that's a problem. But assuming your data is good, then drawing the conclusions and the insights from that data, that's where the value really lies, is is what's working well, what's not working, which part of my advertising is working, right? To quote John Wanamaker. And then, you know, what do you do about the part that isn't working? Do you just shut it down or do you figure out what's wrong with it and improve it? So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the tools that are out there and what people can do so that they get meaningful insights that are actionable instead of just a deluge of data from their agency.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple different parts there, and I think first and foremost, you have to think about the data that you're actively collecting. Now, clearly, you know, in this story that you had of receiving this 15-page report, there's probably no shortage of data there. But simply, I would assume anyways, you're right. Certainly the data and where it comes from entirely depends on what you're doing inside of your marketing program. So that makes a ton of sense and will vary by organization, of course. But certainly first and foremost, I think as a marketing org, you need to be thinking about, are you getting all of the data that you possibly could from these different sources, right? And I'm saying just starting by making sure that you're collecting the correct information, right? I'm not saying you're doing anything with that yet. It's just a matter of, are you collecting all of that information that you should be? Is it accurate? Is it insightful information, right? You're just trying to get to those answering those 3 questions first. But beyond that, that's when it really requires some thoughtful practice about what does this information actually mean? And then of course, how is it going to get used, right? What are things that we can glean from it? In fact, we're working with a client right now on analyzing video performance data coming out of YouTube. And there's this entire area of not just the videos themselves and how they're performing, but also the landing page and the user-based behavior. And then what's kind of the externality or other pieces of information that we can glean from that, as in how many new leads did it drive? What were the business outcomes of these videos? Right. These are all things that maybe they aren't currently collecting and need to be thought of as part of this strategy. So that's certainly part of it.

Yeah. So I think it's a great point. I studied engineering many, many years ago and there was a principle that was called a signal-to-noise ratio, right? And if you're dealing with waveform electronics like radios and things like that, the noise is like the static that you hear. The signal is the stuff you want to hear, the real data. It's the information that the broadcaster is trying to get to you. And on the way to your device, there's noise gets introduced. And it seems to me that a lot of these reports that I seen, and this happened like not just once or twice, but over and over again. It's not just a one-time story where I think the amount of noise was like off the charts and the amount of signal was really tiny. And as a matter of fact, if you just stripped away the noise, the signal would be valuable, frankly, okay? Such as it was. But because you've surrounded it with so much noise, you have to dig around to figure out what's the signal, what's the stuff you want to know. And so by adding all that noise, you've really polluted or diluted the value of the signal that's in there. So just dumping a bunch of data at someone who isn't familiar with it is worse than not giving them the data at all, in my opinion.

Right, right. I think the most important question that head of marketing departments, CMOs, whoever is asking these types of questions, I think one of the most under-asked questions from these people is what is our marketing efforts producing for business outcomes? I think that's a question that so often gets lost.

That's the bottom line, right?

Right. That's the bottom line. Like, is this marketing efforts that you're doing working?

Right?

And I think you could use all sorts of other data to help support that question. And obviously, tastefully, you should, because I think some of, some of it's reasonable to report on. The number of impressions and clicks that your ads received, probably not too meaningful metrics to look at unless there was in context of a specific campaign. But It's amazing to me how often marketers that I'm talking to do not grasp that single question. And I think that's still one of the most important questions to try and be focusing on. And I think really, in my opinion, all reporting and data, everything should be pointing towards trying to help answer that question. Obviously, it takes some sound bullet points to help explain how we got to achieving that goal or not. But I think that that's one thing that's often overlooked and probably the most profound question that you should be thinking about.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there are situations where someone may be buying market share, and so they're going into this thing deliberately losing money on individual sales, but they're actually really gonna make it up in volume because once they start getting some market share, they're selling add-on products. I don't know, whatever, you know, whatever the business model that justifies it. You don't always make money from the get-go when you start doing digital advertising, right? right? In fact, many times you have to kind of trial and error a few things before you get it to work. That's normal. But once you get the process running and it's the kind of the ongoing process, you should be making money with it eventually, or else you're doing something wrong, right? And that's the bottom line. I think you're absolutely right. I think that's what things should point to. Yeah, we should also point out that there's a lot of great tools out there for measurement and reporting of data. And we've talked earlier about the fact that Google Analytics is coming out with a new version. If you haven't heard about Google Analytics number 4, you should go back and read our blog post or listen to the podcast on that because I think that's going to be key. And there's things you should do today to prepare yourself for that. So I think it's, again, the data we have today is much better than what John Wanamaker had back in the turn of the 20th century. But nevertheless, you You know, we probably have more data than John Wanamaker had, and that can itself be a problem if the nuggets of signal that you want are buried in too much noise. So the lesson today is make sure that wherever you're getting your information from, it's boiled down to just the facts, man, because that's where it really— where the rubber meets the road.

Absolutely.

Thanks, Devin. Been a good conversation. Catch you next time.

Yes, sounds good.

Thanks, Hans.

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