Do Butt Clicks Count? Why Marketing is a Bad Investment

If you cannot measure it, there is no point in doing it.

Or so goes the case for measuring the return of our investment, whether in dollars or time, for any given marketing activity. It is good actually. Technology has been an enabler for marketing to drill down to the microscopic level of marketing. However, the focus on a granular level has taken away the vision to the bigger picture. Why?

Because, we’re evolved!

What’s the ROI of the flight delayed for a son to see a dying mother?

What’s the ROI of a smiling usher in the restaurant?

May seem a complicated question to ask. But, an employee smiling at a customer doesn’t cost anything. The customer experience has so many possible touch points today that it almost seems impossible to measure a true financial ROI.

ROI’s roots are in evaluating one-time capital projects. “But is marketing a one-time capital project?” Clearly not! ROI is a useful starting point for sizing up any investment. Remember that ROI is a historical measure, meaning it calculates all the past returns. The point is that an investment can do very well in the past and still falter in the future.

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI."Tim Cook

If marketing’s mandate is to maximize ROI, there is every incentive to never do anything new at all.

Marketing is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability :

ROI by itself says nothing about the likelihood that expected returns and costs will appear as predicted. Neither does it say anything about the risk of an investment. ROI simply shows how returns compare to costs if the action or investment brings the expected results. Therefore, a good marketing investment analysis should also measure the probabilities of different ROI outcomes. It is important to consider both the ROI magnitude and the risks that go with it.

The Citizen Brand :

Headline Findings in a recent 2017 study includes the damning facts that people wouldn’t care if 74% of the brands they use just disappeared and that 60% of the content created by the world’s leading 1,500 brands is “just clutter” that has little impact on their lives (or business results). Instead of customers, propositions and activation, brands need to embrace the new three P's of marketing: people, purpose and participation. This is the future of marketing. This is the ‘Citizen Brand’.

Are we prepared for the world beyond ROI?

The pursuit of a perfect ROI calculation will exhaust the very resources that are supposed to deliver ROI.

We have uncertainty all around the plate, probability is the new ingredient and AI seems to be the sauce that will perfect the taste! The development and testing of new attribution models that move away from last touch and toward more comprehensive assessments, which includes multiple futures, will be the way forward. These models will eventually impact how marketers measure ROI and plan campaigns. New AI-powered algorithms will be tested to determine entirely new ways to create meaningful experiences and then define and measure the REAL ROI.

 “Even though you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there”. Will Rogers.

What are the multiple futures that could turn a marketing plan upside down? 

Read more about this in my book “Do Butt Clicks Count? Why Marketing is a Bad Investment”

Five new changes to Google Analytics

Digital Analytics is becoming more and more core to a business’ strategy. Without a good Digital Analytics team and implementation in place, a business cannot measure its performance, set KPIs, test new functionality and spot opportunities for new product development.

Google Analytics is the first port of call for most people – but there have been several challenges while docking the ship here!

The most common ones have been Data sampling – when looking at segmented data and longer time frames, Google Analytics samples the data to ensure the speed of the interface. This causes issues because the business want to see the raw numbers.

Besides, Limited dashboards – the dashboards can be effective if kept simple, but most of the time you cannot do what you want to do. No customisation is possible and you can only add 12 reports to the dashboard.

The new GA Dashboard tries to address these issues with a more modern UI and we are loving it!

Why these new changes?

The improved contextual abilities in the GA dashboard open the door for analytics to help companies create knowledge capital — the intangible assets that accrue from deeper insights and better decision-making.

For Industries such as retail that are facing a data upheaval, managing of knowledge capital is an essential strategic task, the only route through which this is possible is data aggregation.

Google seems to have already thought this through and tries to retain all the features users cherish while making the metrics — and the insights they yield — easier to understand as ever more complex analytics are introduced.

What are these exactly?

User Customized Interface:

Users are greeted by a curated set of report views called snippets. Each report snippet will be preceded by a question that frames the data in the report, such as “When do your visitors arrive?” or “Where do your visitors come from?” Users can hover their cursors to drill down for more detail on single data points or drill into the relevant report using the links embedded in each snippet.

Google introduced a redesigned mobile app that provided better at-a-glance insights for users who wanted highlights without having to view the complete report via laptop.The app is already a rockstar with a million downloads.

Graduate Hat:

In most sections of the new Google Analytics layout, you’ll see a little graduate’s hat. You can use these to learn more about how to interpret the data you find throughout Google Analytics

Navigation:

 Everything has moved to the left! Say goodbye to the navigation at the top; Home, Reporting, Customisation and Admin have all been relocated. Admin has been relocated to the bottom of the side navigation.

Why? Because this is more convenient, mak

ing it easier navigating to settings and back to reports. No more waiting for Google Analytics to reload, the reports are always waiting for you to the left of the page – meaning you don’t have to go into the reports view!

Date Ranges:

There’s some customization involved, too — users with goals or e-commerce will see a different home page than those without, for example. The various widgets (for lack of a better term) on

If you ever find yourself working with the same data range on a regular basis, but when you login to Google Analytics this date range has been set back to the default, you will be glad to know that there is now an option to change this date range by default. The new home page will also offer date filters like “last 7 days” and “last 30 days” — no need to dive into the various reports for those views.

The impact on businesses

In this era of digitized brand and business interactions, when insights can seem disjointed, Google knows that data aggregation represents the vital first step toward creating the kinds of Predictive, Descriptive and Prescriptive models that will help devise a more holistic data science strategy.

Looking at Google’s record-card ,we can confidently predict more prediction. Come what may, only time will tell what we'll tell of time to come!

Anne,a mother of twin babies,purchased a stroller.She had been researching at it for 9 months now, much before she actually required it.Across online portals,reviews, friends and of course the television commercials were always there.

Let’s say the brand she bought has a presence across all of these channels.Because of the variety of touchpoints, it makes it difficult to measure exactly where the ad was first noticed that encouraged a conversion across this cycle of 9 months.Consumers may remember your brand, but may not be able to recall where they saw your ads.

The marketer for the brand will surely have a tough time attributing this sale to one channel and then calculate the ROI for it.It goes without saying,the road ahead is going to be more bumpy as more and more marketing touchpoints are integrated into the daily life of a customer.

An Art that has become larger than Science:

In an ideal world,ROI = (Revenue growth – Marketing budget)/Marketing budget

What about these factors then?

1.Customer satisfaction impact

2.Multiple Influencers

3.External macro-economic trends

Marketing will move beyond theories that are false and theories that are not yet false.to measure it we would require tools to assess the degree of likelihood of a theory.

Marketing Ratience will be the successor to Marketing Performance Management,which incorporates information theory and probability theory.

In Anne’s case,the probability of various touchpoints in her kind of persona would be crucial for attribution.

The problem with ROI obsession:

So what can be done to get a hold on this Miura bull called ROI.We take a step back here and forget about the ROI of Marketing.And,think about the cost of ignoring it.

If, ROI translates into measuring the variables and outcomes most applicable to the particular business,then this means we are ignoring the very factors which measures the business profitability.

The larger problem with ROI. It encourages us to play our cards safe and hence underperform.

The Unicorn of marketing,Content :

Content, the poster boy of marketing at the moment, seems to fall under the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.It states no particle simultaneously has both a precise position and a precise momentum. We can't measure both, precisely because they don't both exist simultaneously.So true for content.

This principles brings on a few questions on content:

•             How does this new white paper and complementary video add value to the X marketing campaign, but also the value of the Y product release and Z customer forum?

•             What’s the value of a newsletter subscribed member? How does that value increase over time as the member matures and the amount of such data become larger and richer?

•             How does the value of each content asset fluctuate over time

•             How does the publishing of media-related products increase the value of the brand over time by establishing us as a differentiated brand?

Having said that, the power of content can not be denied.A terrific example here is, ZAGG, an online retailer, knows its blog results in sales.It earns a whopping 172% ROI and 10% of the company's site traffic.It is the single most important driver of sales for it today.

KPI’s in a constantly shifting world:

Key performance indicators (KPIs) use quantifiable metrics to determine performance over time. These metrics must be customized to your business and goals. In the fast moving digital landscape, KPIs should be selected based on three factors:

-How soon does it matter – business urgency

-How much does it matter- business importance

-How long does it matter-business significance

One of the most important things about spending dollars to get the attention, is to make sure that you are ready for the attention.

XEROX’s “Get Optimistic”campaign with Forbes to connect with 30 top accounts .70% of targeted companies interacted with the microsite, readership increased 300-400% over previous email campaigns, added 20,000 new contacts, generated 1,000+ scheduled appointments, and get this: yielded $1.3 BILLION in pipeline revenue.

It's not about just having a website. It's whether or not that website works well to sell. Remember,it was finally the web or in-store experience that led Anne to purchase the stroller.And,this is where the holy grail of UX lies.But that is a story for another time. Stay tuned!