Would you Rather Make Money or Track your Marketing Funnel?

In the corporate marketing world, it’s really important to demonstrate your results. I’ve gotten this lesson time and time again from managers, HBR articles, and corporate career training materials. I was told that you never dare to go into a high-level meeting without a solid understanding of the performance of whatever it is you own. You had better track back budgets to all sorts of metrics like conversions and ROI and impressions and site visits – and be able to tell the succinct story for the person who doesn’t actually understand the metrics.

Why? Down the line, performance impacts staffing, resources for campaigns, the team’s tech stack, and most areas of the business.

It makes sense – if something isn’t performing, you’re not going to do more of it. We don’t want to squander precious time and money on marketing methods that fail. Every* business needs to turn a profit to keep the lights on and make payroll and it’s marketing’s job to keep that train moving.

(*save for VC startups with a different model, but let’s assume we’re not getting bankrolled here)

But I’m here to push back: why don’t marketing leaders and executives understand that not everything in marketing is neatly trackable? And why are they at times willing to sacrifice potential sales for the ability to track?

Analytics and tracking

At my three full-time marketing jobs in my career, tracking performance has been an important part of my work. I tracked the attendance of webinars, performance of marketing emails, and conversion from MQL to SQL at Houzz; at Kajabi I tracked growth metrics like web analytics and how our YouTube channel performed, and at Milli I’m launching our organic SEO strategy basically from scratch (among other things).

In all of my years staring into analytics platforms, one thing is clear: you’re never going to get the full picture of your customer’s marketing and sales cycle.

Potential touchpoints reach across people and devices

To illustrate this, I’ll use my own life as an example. Here are all of the different marketing touchpoints I engage with:

·         My husband and I will watch a TikTok on his account on his cell phone

·         We’ll watch a video YouTube on his account on our TV – but with YouTube premium, so no ads, just if the video is sponsored from the creator

·         We’ll listen to a podcast ad via his device in the car

·         Sometimes I hear old-fashioned FM radio ads in the car

·         I’ll see an Instagram ad or sponsored post on my feed on my cell phone

·         I’ll get a marketing email and open that on either my cell phone or desktop computer, occasionally my iPad

·         I’ll read a listicle with affiliate links on any of my three devices

·         I’ll see a billboard or print ad out in the wild, like an airport or train station  

So we’ve got eight different touchpoints on three devices, and two that have no device associated (because they can’t track FM radio in my car… I think…)

For any product I might buy thanks to advertising, they could engage with me across any of these eight touchpoints (or more). If I go and convert via the Instagram ad, well, that looks like it really made the sale! But at least in my life, it’s more likely to be the sponsored YouTube video or product review blog post did more of the legwork to actually convince me to buy the product.

And there are plenty of other platforms and channels in the mix that I don’t use personally – Pinterest, Twitter, magazines, certain billboards I don’t drive by, much less a plethora of influencers online. Another thing to add to the mix? People sharing their organic findings and sponsored ads with others. 

Just because it’s not trackable doesn’t mean it doesn’t work

Here’s an example. I’m in the market for new glasses. I’m a repeat customer of Warby Parker (though my last purchase was five years ago). I recently noticed they started popping up more on my Facebook feed. Why? They are posting cute, fun statuses. (Similar posts are on their Twitter as well).

Some of them have nothing to do with their main product, some do. They have no link to their website.

But you know what? I went and ordered a home try-on box from them for the first time in years, and liked two of the pairs of glasses. I will give them more of my dollars in a few weeks after I get my new prescription at my eye appointment.

But, the Warby Parker marketing team will have no way to track if these are effective for conversion. In fact, since I went to their site after seeing the post, I needed to go to my web browser and search for them or type in the URL to get to their site. That would muddy up the traffic, because it didn’t get attributed to organic social, even though it was that channel which ultimately encouraged me to go to the site.

Of course, the marketing methods that work for a DTC brand with a nationwide retail footprint are going to be different than a SaaS brand, or mobile bank, or car dealership. But at the core, making someone laugh from a Facebook status or tweet that actually showed up on their feed because it skipped the link might just be what gets someone to spend money with you  - and marketers in all industries lose sight of that.

Last click attribution

Last click attribution is a common model because of course, we want to know what drives conversion, but also… it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to configure multi-touch attribution.

At Kajabi, we had a tool for some kind of multi-touch attribution that was a real dream; it wasn’t totally perfect because of the challenges listed above. But, at least it demonstrated that indeed, our efforts on the blog were helpful at multiple points in the funnel even if that’s not where they first came to the website or the last thing they engaged with before they converted. (Rockerbox, I love and miss you every day)

We did this lower-tech at Houzz, just using the Salesforce record to pull up which marketing emails and webinars a lead interacted with as part of their journey to close. We didn’t model off of that information – just kept it in the back of our minds that it was a factor (which is really all I ask).

So if your team is really committed to performance tracking, it’s worth investing in the tools that promote visibility of more of the marketing picture – then give credit where credit is due.

Leaders, get with it

So back to the scenario at the beginning – it’s the big performance review meeting of the quarter/year/campaign or the OKR prep session – and visibility into data is basically worth its weight in gold. You’ve got to have it to be able to stand up your points or you’re embarrassing yourself and your team in front of the executives.

Well, how hard is it for an executive to understand that data gaps not only exist, but are arguably more prevalent than data visibility?

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that consumers don’t behave in a way that’s totally trackable. After all, do they enable all cookies for every website they visit? No. Most of us have multiple devices. We go through the world as a human, not just a lead in the databases for all the products and services we might buy.

So let’s stop the pressure for low-level ICs and managers to constantly pull data with a perfectly clear story of their marketing performance. It simply doesn’t exist. It’s way more like, “hey our YouTube channel is working great, but I can’t tell you who bought because of it and when, and no I don’t know how many blog posts someone reads before they become a customer, but I can tell you which ones are doing better in organic search so just trust me when I say these things are good for us to keep doing.” But no, they want to track everything, so they will throw a million dollars in display ads despite the fact that everyone age 30 and under was taught never to click on ads because they would give your computer automatic viruses.

I’d say we can harness a little of that “analytics or they’re slashing our budget” panic energy for the people at the top to understand that the picture of marketing success is a bit hazy. All marketers need is trust that the team on the ground executing the campaigns is making good decisions.

So what should we do about the hazy marketing picture?

In short, I think tracking what you can is great. The data tools that are out there can be super helpful to understand what’s working and what types of marketing channels and actions are more likely to perform better than others. We should do our best to measure how things are going to continually refine our marketing strategy and dollars to be efficient.

But we also need to take analytics and data with a grain of salt. We shouldn’t be so hesitant to try things that could perform really well just because the tracking isn’t possible, or isn’t neatly wrapped with a bow.

Build in an experimental budget and trust that your marketing teams won’t volunteer to waste their time on stuff that doesn’t matter. After all, it just might be the slightly unhinged organic Facebook status that nabs the sale.