Eric Siu argues that obsessive campaign tracking kills marketing results. The classic rule holds: 50% of ad spend is wasted, but you don't know which half. Most marketers should track reach, MQLs, and SQLs instead of chasing pixel-level attribution.
All right. So today we are going to talk about if marketers should measure everything. There are quotes out there that say, if you are going to manage something, you should be measuring it, right? So what gets measured gets managed. So first and foremost, there's actually a really good quote from an advertiser. He said, 50% of my advertising spend is wasted. I just don't know which 50%. So if you stay till the very end, I'm actually going to talk to you about what is worth measuring. This post I threw up on LinkedIn actually got about 344,000 impressions on it, about 4,700 likes or so. So clearly it struck a chord and I'm actually going to gonna do another video on that so you can watch that one in terms of how you can get 344,000 impressions on a single post. Here I wrote, 10 years ago, marketers used to obsess over every single little thing. So you have pixels, you have tracking links, multi-channel attribution, all these things, right? And you can see here's the actual advertising spend quote from John Wanamaker. If you think about it, there are so many disparate channels now. You have SEO, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reels, you have Shorts, YouTube long-form, podcasts, events, SMS, email, and more and more and more. There's just so many different channels out there that it's almost impossible to If you're enjoying this right now, don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button because it helps with the YouTube algorithm. But I'm actually going to continue on with this post over here talking about the diminishing returns. So over here I say trying to measure every single thing after a certain point just starts to become counterproductive. So what I mean by that is like a basketball player that's a really good free throw shooter. If you're already shooting 95% from the line, then trying to optimize that 100%, you start to see diminishing returns. It's not as big as a jump as optimizing from a 50% shooter to maybe like an 80% shooter, right? You just start to make more shots. Now it's the same thing with marketing. If you start to focus on these little granular things, especially if it's a smaller business, the returns aren't going to be that big. Now if you're a multi-billion dollar company, that's a different story, and if you have the resources for it, it's definitely worth it. But for the vast majority of you that are watching this right now, it's understanding that you have diminishing returns. Now what should you be measuring then? Well, if you are doing marketing activities, let's say you're posting a bunch to social media, it's almost impossible to measure every single thing that you're doing because social media is so fleeting. You have these feed-style posts, you're posting something to stories, it's just hard to see what's going on after a period of time. Now, you can definitely use tools like Sprout Social, you can definitely use tools like Shield for LinkedIn. There's a lot of different analytics apps out there, but it still becomes difficult. Now, if you want to make this a little more manageable, then what I would encourage you to do from a metric standpoint is to think about what you can be measuring at a high level. So this means for social media, it could be reach. Maybe you're optimizing for MQL. So these are marketing qualified leads. Maybe you're optimizing for SQLs, these are sales qualified leads. You gotta think about what your goals are and then what's easier to measure at a very high level. And then at a certain point, if you're just trying to hold your team accountable, you're looking at reach, you look at these high-level goals, but you're also looking at posting activity too. These things are easier to measure and you can then focus on things that are higher impact. So if you enjoyed this video and you want help with stuff like this, you can check out my ad agency. It's just singlegrain.com. Or if you wanna work at Single Grain, just go to singlegrain.com/work. Well then we'll catch you later. Bye.
