Help! I’m Drowning in Data!

Have you ever felt lost in a sea of data, with no pos­si­ble way out?  If so, then you’re prob­a­bly an Inter­net mar­keter, in some form or fla­vor.  For a typ­i­cal Inter­net mar­ket­ing client, I find myself mea­sur­ing sev­eral dozen dif­fer­ent data points at any given time.  From Quant­cast met­rics to Google Ana­lyt­ics, Social Men­tions and Con­ver­sion Rates — I some­times get the feel­ing that there’s just too much.

As Inter­net mar­keters, we have to mea­sure every­thing… right?  To prove our value, to prove that Inter­net mar­ket­ing works, to show stake­hold­ers that our efforts have an impact. 

I mean, I get it.  Num­bers can’t pos­si­bly lie, and in this very dig­i­tal age, there are very few things that can’t be con­verted to mea­sur­able num­bers in some form.  Plus, pretty charts and graphs make it much eas­ier for deci­sion mak­ers to jus­tify the expense (invest­ment) of an Inter­net mar­ket­ing campaign.

But have you ever asked your­self — how much is too much?

This is what I’d like to see: a con­sol­i­da­tion of data.  Let’s come up with a met­ric that either mea­sures sev­eral dif­fer­ent impor­tant data points and aggre­gates into a sin­gle num­ber, or, we start cut­ting out data that just doesn’t mat­ter, or isn’t accurate.

That said, an aggre­gate sin­gle data point may be too ideal to be a real­ity.  Inter­net mar­ket­ing mea­sures are very sub­jec­tive, and thus, a sin­gle point prob­a­bly won’t work.

Cut­ting out use­less data may be the best option.  How do you do this?  Find out what the true goals of a cam­paign are, and mea­sure only the vari­ables that will help to advance those goals.

For exam­ple, say you’re run­ning a cam­paign that’s meant to increase con­ver­sion rates.  Would you mea­sure your Twit­ter reach and engage­ment?  Maybe.  But wouldn’t you rather mea­sure your site traf­fic, actions, exit pages, flows and con­ver­sions?  Yes! Of course!  Twit­ter reach may in some way influ­ence con­ver­sion rates, but I think when you get down to it, the extra data will cloud the pic­ture and lead to some poor decisions.

The bot­tom line is, yes, data is impor­tant, and mea­sur­ing cam­paign per­for­mance is not an option.  But lets be sure we’re pick­ing the right data to mea­sure.  After all, who wants to drown in data?

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