So, as marketers we are ever-more focused on data and ROI. It seems like every day we are being bombarded with how we have to use data to justify our choices. But I was reminded today that we need to make sure we balance this when I read a blog post by Douglas Bowman at StopDesign. Douglas is (or rather “was” as of today) a designer with Google. In his blog post, he laments how all design challenges are being reduced to logic problems. He says they “remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.” This is a bad trend (and a lesson for us all). And no matter how much we like Google’s performance – I think is a sure way to kill performance in marketing. - but the point here is that relying too much on data can lead to bad decisions – and that’s especially true in marketing. Data is impartial – and it is a tool. And that tool can be misused, misinterpreted and misapplied. If managers get confused about “what the numbers say” and just simply throw more data at a problem – pretty soon that becomes the answer to everything. Customers love our new web site design? Where’s the data? That gets pretty silly over time – and leads (I believe) to an inability what . The quintessential, and simple example that I’ve experienced in this is looking at your Search Engine Marketing data and making budget decisions based only on that data. One search term may get 52% conversions and another 2%. Your immediate reaction is to fund the former and kill the latter. But following those leads all the way down your sales funnel finds that the 2% who converted off the smaller search term actually turned into wonderful, valuable customers – whereas the 52% were all tire-kickers and/or people who never bought. There’s also a corollary with our Social Media marketing, our content marketing and just our general lives. Who cares if we have 100,000 followers on Twitter if 99,990 of them don’t care about what we say. Who cares if we are #1 on Google for content that has nothing to do with what we do. For any startup out there looking at online marketing – I can tell you first hand that if you have an extraordinarily low cost-per-click or cost-per-conversion – but sales are in the dumper no one will care. And, on the other hand if your data shows you A friend of mine used to say “is that hat wearin’ her or is she wearin’ that hat?”…. Data is a great hat. Just make sure it doesn’t cover your very creative eyes. Happy Spring!!There’s a great quote by Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics that I love: “If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment.”
r CPC is going through the r
oof – but sales are blowing out the roof – you’re a hero.