Sometimes Simple Digital Marketing Analytics . . . Are Too Simple
Do you get overwhelmed by your digital marketing analytics? Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches do. There are a lot of channels to account for: email, social, SEO, SEM, referral links, etc. Trying to make sense of data from all the platforms that drive these channels can be daunting. Trying to consolidate all the metrics into one tool like Google Analytics sounds ideal but can get very complicated and time consuming to implement and verify.
This leads many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches to seek out simplified versions of the data through reports or dashboards. While the motive is understandable, and even admirable, it requires a dedicated process of compiling the complicated data into a comprehensive and informative dashboard. Anything less will oversimplify your data rather than clarify it.
Need an example of how oversimplification causes problems? Recently a group of trainers were interested in how their personal social media posts compared to the posts to the company social media pages. Compiling the data from the social media platforms data was going to take time and money that the trainers did not want to spend.
As a shortcut, the trainers requested monthly analytic data from their established marketing dashboard, Google Analytics, to get a high level view of their digital marketing efforts. Since Google Analytics was set up to track traffic from social media and could be segmented to identify the source, the assumption was that it would be a solid data set to see what profiles were generating the best results, personal vs. company. The data clearly showed that the company profiles were generating more traffic, about 3 clicks to one.
The decision was made that personal social media accounts were not generating as many clicks, so the trainers would scale back their activity on social media and invest their time elsewhere. A month later, leads had dropped by twenty percent.
What happened? Oversimplifying the data meant that interactions on social media platform like comments or requests were overlooked. Google Analytics was only compiling data from people that visited the site from social media links. It was completely ignoring any leads that were generated directly on the social media platform.
These lead sources were a rich channel of opportunity that suddenly was cut off because incomplete data was used to evaluate personal profiles. Upon re-instating personal profile activity and doing a more comprehensive review, we found that the trainer’s personal profile activity was producing slightly better results than the company profiles.
If you are going to evaluate an element in your digital marketing process, make sure you have a reliable and understandable data set to work with. It’s almost impossible to get a comprehensive set of data from all your channels to account for all your marketing interactions. Be aware of your data’s blind spots and at least incorporate anecdotal for the channels where your data is not centralized. Simplifying complex sets of data is helpful to get digestible metrics. However, simplifying metrics often leads to oversimplifying the information which results in lazy and unproductive digital marketing decisions.