In a recent article in the Think with Google series, Casey Carey, Director, Platforms & Publisher Marketing at Google, makes a telling point: just 17% of advertisers surveyed said they are looking at the performance of all their digital channels.
Which leaves the following questions unanswered: what about the missing 83%? And why is it so difficult for them to know what’s actually working across their various digital platforms?
And all of this gets worse for smaller and medium sized businesses, who have most to gain from using digital, and perhaps most to lose from missing an opportunity or deploying precious budget in the wrong channels or on the wrong content.
The problem has been that knowing the performance of your digital campaigns across multiple platforms has previously been too hard, too late, too inaccurate and too expensive.
Part of the challenge is that to make this a reality is difficult. For example, IBM says we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day. That’s a lot of zeros.
Breaking that down to what matters to your customer, where they are and what they will engage with becomes critical to get right and of great concern to those wanting to get the most of their budget.
To do so, data has to be normalized across multiple platforms for it to become useful in a comparative sense, with even something as trivial as the start of the day being different for each platform, but also to see the same measures of engagement or click throughs to be consistent and to make true price and conversion rate comparisons.
Data is the lifeblood of marketing, customer satisfaction and selling, yet it seems data solutions tend to either be priced out of the hands of most businesses – either in licensing costs or in the time and complexity required to get this up and running.
Marketers deserve better, whatever the size of their organisations, whatever their skill-sets. They need tools that let them track the performance and the returns they get from the investments they make in digital marketing, across paid, earned and owned media. (Imagine trying to fly an aircraft but only being able to see out of one side of the cockpit, with only some of your instrumentation working.) And this data should cover measurements such as total spend, impressions, CPM, engagement and engagement rate, CPE, video views, link clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC) for campaigns and adsets, across the main digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Google Ads.
With this information to hand, SMBs and startups can then track who’s talking about them, use hashtags to create and follow conversations important to their brands, and track in-channel performance.
And then make great decisions to create better experiences for their customers.
If you’re unsure about your digital performance, you owe it to yourself to find out what’s working for you. Your data is too valuable to waste, and your customers are waiting to talk to you.
Emma Lo Russo is co-founder and CEO at Digivizer.
