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Do the online metric really measure what they claim to measures?
Over the recent years, digital marketing has gain ground. Almost every corporate or personality do use digital platform to market their services and products. Digital marketing are regard as more cost effective and also provide an effective platform of understanding customers. However, just like convention marketing, marketers are interested in measuring the performances of their effort in digital marketing platform. While there are quite a number of metric to measure online performances , the real question is do these metrics Including Bouncy rate, Traffic metric , Channel-specific metrics etc, really measures what they claim to be measuring?
First, before, we look at how effectives these metric are in measuring what they claim to measure, let first understand who the guys behind them are. Most metric used to measure online customer engagement are provided by firms offering marketing services Including Google, Nielsen, facebook among others. It is therefore important as marketer to ask oneself what other motive these companies may have other than providing the insight about performance of their digital marketing effort. Well it may be argued that since most of these companies also sell advertising space, for instance Google, they may cook-up insight to show positive performances simply to motivate marketer to continue using their platform or consumer their advertising services in large scale.
Most of these metrics uses technology programming to measures whatever they claim to measure. It can therefore conclude that if the metrics are well programmed, they are higher chances of measuring exactly what they want to measures. On the other hand, if not well programmed or the programming is manipulated for reasons well know to the companies; the insight given to marketers is likely to be misleading, manipulated or exaggerated. For Instance, Nielsen, a reputable marketing company, recently admitted that it Online metric as was used in YouTube was incorrectly programmed and for a period of 18 Month, the company had been providing marketers and advertisers with incorrect/misleading Insight about consumers behaviours. Many markets did actually relied on these insights to make decision on digital marketing spending.
The key point here is although online metrics are very useful in this digital marketing era, the marketer should be very cautious when using them to inform their decision especially those relating to spending on digital marketing. Unethical companies may manipulate their metrics to dupe marketers in spending more on their digital platform while in fact the actual result may be totally different from what reported by these metrics. It would however be a grave mistake for marketer to ignore these metrics because they may miss a lot of opportunity offered by the digital platform. What they really need to do, is just be a little bit cautious. They can also use several strategies to verify the authenticity or accuracy of the insight provided to them. For instance, a marketer can use two different analytical services which use similar services to measures performance of their digital marketing. By doing so, they would be able to compare the insights provided by these metric. If there is any significant variance between two similar metric from different companies, the marketer should have a reason to worry.