Lies, damn lies & metrics — the death of digital media

Metrics are the most believable of lies. They come pre-packaged with cause and effect, giving us the comfort of feeling our actions have led to an outcome. They are an easy pointer to success, and often become the focal point of a campaign, versus actual success.

The ease of creating metrics has pretty much created an industry built on loose association and correlation, hardly ever causation. One of the great deceptions of the digital marketing era is measurability. This would indicate that there is some source of truth being conveyed by the metrics, which in fact there hardly ever really is, especially as the key metrics are delivered by the same guys who sell you the advertising that drove the metrics.

The industry has evolved its metrics so many times in 20 years that its astounding we believe them. In the beginning there was hits (don’t worry if you don’t know what they are), then “time on site”, then there were pageviews, then we stripped out bot traffic to provide real page views, then browsers, then unique browsers etc. etc. etc. Each time our panacea disrupted by something even more panacea-like.

Metrics for metric’s sake, e.g. “Facebook Likes” OR Pageviews OR Time on page are dangerous. Many digital agencies chase the metric without focusing on an actual outcome, somehow believing that more “Likes” will drive more of something else, most often that something else still isn’t the outcome you want (like a sale). I have heard many digital agency folk speak of the benefit of a facebook “community” but not know what edgerank is.

Last click attribution bias is also significant, as it leads you to make some terrifying assumptions about the effectiveness of your marketing mix.

Even with much better technology then we have ever had, it is hard to disprove that old saying “Half of my advertising is working, I just don’t know which half”, especially as you mix a number of mediums together.

Yet digital agencies still bring out numbers that point to clickthroughs and then make a variety of assumptions and recommendations, without lead scoring or any other analysis to back up their data. I compare it to throwing bones, only with excel instead of knuckles.

My pet hate is agencies that optimise for the number of clicks and not for the number of conversions. Once clients wake up (and they are), the break between digital media buyer and digital agency will rapidly disappear. The rapid march of technology and audience buying (my inner cynic arises) means that buying media has been so dumbed down that there really is no mystery left in it. And when there is no mystery … there is no margin.