With more and more advertisers exploring the opportunities in the digital domain, they are discovering an explosion of data. The challenge becomes translating the data into insight, knowledge, or something that is actionable. Often times, translating the data can be somewhat perplexing. I believe you have to start with the issue of relevancy. Not all the information or data you might be getting through various digital sources may be relevant to your overall marketing goal. Often times, the sellers of digital services will want to present the data as actual results, but that is not always the case.
We often find that as we dig deeper into the data, that even some of the terminology used to express what the data says can be a little misleading. As with almost any data set, the information may include assumptions that I believe are sometimes questionable. One of the most basic ones is "impressions". Just because an ad was served on a page that was visited, doesn't mean necessarily that an impression was created. This is true because a given page may have multiple ads, not all of which got the attention of the user.
Another issue is understanding how the data was collected. For several years, we have had multiple clients that have run on media websites. Each month, we get reports that show a significantly larger number of click throughs than we can document through any independent tracking tool such as Google Analytics. Nobody I've spoken to can seem to address why, at least not in a way that I understand, such a great discrepancy exists. I do not believe that these companies are being deceptive, but rather they use software that is designed to use the most favorable and generous results for their client, which is the media website, not the advertiser. (Forgive me if that seems too cynical.)
That's why I believe that if you want to turn data into knowledge, you have to look at a broad spectrum of data and look to see what marketing impact you can confirm from multiple sources. By designing a set of marketing goals defined by independent data sources, it can give you a better perspective of what your digital marketing is actually achieving. For most of our clients, the bottom line is the number of forms completed or the number of calls from qualified prospects. When our clients are not receiving effective results, we can't immediately conclude that the digital platform is at fault. Some of the available data, when analyzed properly, can clarify what is not working and identify what might work better.
Bottom line: don't let media reports with lots of data be your sole source of evaluating your investment.
