Thinking about digital marketing and big numbers

(The german version of this text can be found here.)

Why are marketing people so fascinated by large numbers? More page views, more visitors, higher click-through-rates …

Perhaps simply because these numbers are so easily available and the rule “the bigger the number the better” is so dead simple?

The result of this thinking are increasing online budgets — year after year after year: More advertising = more page views = more success.

Really?

Three thoughts about this:

• “More budget is better” is a pure waste of money. The reality: Less is more. Procter & Gamble noticed no measurable difference in sales after a 60% (!) online marketing budget cut.
• “More clicks are better” is completely meaningless. 1000 clicks from anybody (and without anything else happening after that click) is much less worth than 1 click from someone who fits well to the offer of the company (and gets more and more into contact with the company).
• “More page views per user are better” is nonsense. A user who reads a page intensively because it contains exactly the information he needs is 1000 times more valuable than a user who skips through a dozen pages but does not find what he is looking for.

Real change needs new metrics. And often much simpler ones.

The good news: Only those marketers who have measured a lot of rubbish will learn how to measure what’s important with few measurements.

Read more: live.mgm-tp.com