A lack of Digital Cunning
bigbuzz September 24th, 2009
A recent AdAge article featured the headline “Luxury Marketers Move Online but Most Lack Digital Cunning”.
No Shit!
Most companies still lack digital cunning or basic knowledge as to how to best utilize the internet to drive their business. One reason is the varying views as to what success looks like online. Another is that few success models are available and even fewer people want to look at what brought that success.
I was faced with multiple examples of this recently as I met with various clients. Invariably they told me how much of their budgets were going to interactive advertising and how well it was doing but when asked to qualify their success the answer was “We get a lot of hits.“
OK, I am learning to overlook the inaccurate use of hits understanding they are meaning click throughs and site traffic. However, non could go beyond the hits and convert that to conversions, actual sales. Why? If all your efforts are going to driving traffic fine but if you are selling books or games or shoes you want to know how those hits converted to dollars.
Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on hits that bring in no sales? Why wouldn’t tracking be in place to give the conversion info so that you could see if your efforts were actually profitable?
Too often we see good ideas, especially in the digital realm, taken half way to a point where success and failure can not be determined. In these cases the definition of success and failure is changed to meet the outcome. “Hey, that banner got us a 30% increase in traffic! The campaign was a success.” Too bad the time spent on your site plummeted and your bounce rate skyrocketed. And it’s really too bad that your sales didn’t increase a a bit.
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