Marketing myopia

Why don’t people use their website metrics?

Nothing frightens a Marketing Manager so much as having to prove ROI. And these days, nothing holds the key to ROI more than their website.

So when they’re offered a tool to understand how it’s working, you’d think they’d jump at the chance – right?

Wrong.

Hard to believe, but only a small proportion of Marketing Managers pay more than passing attention to what is probably the most important tool in their box: their website metrics.

OK, so google (or other) analytics give you so much extraneous information that sometimes it’s hard to unjumble the truth from all that clutter.

And OK, so sometimes their instinct is telling them one thing while the metrics are telling them another.

And sometimes ‘soft’ factors, like brand history and development, or conflicting segment requirements, get in the way of their consequential actions, like A/B or multivariate testing.

Yet how else are they going to prove ROI to the boss, than by objectively demonstrating their relentless march towards achieving KPIs? How are they going to make decisions about expenditure, which have to be justified in front of the Board?

The tools are there for the asking. They’re often free, and always inexpensive. They can be a little confusing at first but they’re not complicated. More to the point, they’re the only really objective measure we have of what works and what doesn’t.

Ignore them, and suffer from marketing myopia. Use them and see clearly into the future.