Who doesn’t like watching thrilling football games on Sundays (U.S.) or soccer, cricket, rugby, or pretty much every other kind of sport (Rest of World)? Watching sports has always been a favorite, lazy pastime; never more so than now.
Should digital marketing be a spectator sport, like watching sports? No. But sadly, most of the digital marketing we are doing right now is just that — watching sports and big numbers on dashboards — and we need to change that and get back to doing real marketing.
I’m not making any sense? I get that a lot. Let me explain.
Lots of Stats; Plethora of Data
In watching sports, viewers are charmed with healthy doses of stats — from quarterback ratings to the historic records of games played between two teams, dating back dozens of years. Most viewers see those stats as somehow pertinent or perhaps predictive of what will happen in the game that is about to be played. But of course, no one can actually predict the future. No matter how high Dak Prescott’s quarterback rating was in previous games, it won’t help the Dallas Cowboys win the current game, if Dak suffered a season-ending ankle injury during the game and had to be carted off. And obviously previous meetings between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants have zero bearing on the current game, since the teams and coaches were entirely different over the years. But yet sports watchers eat it all up. The more (stats), the better.
Digital marketing was supposed to be the most measurable form of marketing. It is (the most measurable, compared to any other form of advertising). But more data doesn’t mean better data. More data could often mean just more crap. And the insights derived from it are just as crappy too. Digital marketing is overflowing with so much data that marketers simply file it away after glancing at it, never truly digging in or questioning whether the plethora of data is accurate or even real. Further, unlike your favorite food and drink where more is definitely better, “more is better” doesn’t hold true in digital marketing.
More is Better; Bigger Numbers Are Better
That’s because more data is not necessarily better data. If you’ve read any of my previous writing on bot activity and ad fraud, you will remember that large numbers of ad impressions, clicks, and traffic can be generated by bots. All of these activities are faithfully recorded by analytics. If marketers don’t realize this and correct for it, the insights they draw from the analytics will be wrong and they will make incorrect business decisions. For example, fake or fraudulent sites often exhibit much higher click through rates on ads than real sites with real human audiences. That’s because the fake sites use all bot traffic; humans don’t click on ads much (that’s assuming they even saw the ad in the first place and were not using ad blockers). Marketers have fallen victim to these “too-good-to-be-true” numbers and unwittingly allocated even more budget to fake sites (exhibiting high CTRs) and away from real sites (exhibiting lower CTRs).
The analogy to watching sports should be clear. Higher scores win the game. Larger numbers of passing yards and rushing yards are better than smaller numbers of those. It is so deeply ingrained in our psyche that bigger numbers are better. No wonder marketers today are looking for larger numbers of ad impressions to buy, more clicks on the ads, and larger amounts of traffic to sites, etc. Bigger numbers like these don’t necessarily translate into better business outcomes from the marketing activity. Marketers who are NOT 1) actively studying the data, 2) removing the noise and fraud to get a “cleaner read” and 3) optimizing campaigns based on realistic analytics, are simply “watching sports.” Bigger numbers in dashboards and excel spreadsheets are just as mesmerizing as sports scores, but it’s not actual marketing.
The Illusion of Choice and Control
Some marketers are busy…
