This Is A Blog About Marketing And Psychology.
Analytics is not one of the favorite topics when someone speaks about digital marketing. It is one of the crucial components of digital marketing but Social Media, Mobile Marketing, Paid Search, SEO or UX just sound way hotter. That’s probably the reason why it is rare to find someone who truly understands what they are doing when it comes to implementing a tracking system let alone having enough experience adapting to the constant changes in digital measurements.
My friend who has been in the analytics field for over 5 years said she can almost always find errors in tracking when looking at a company’s website. To my surprise, she added, a lot of the large fortune 500 companies with media budget over hundreds of thousands of dollars do not know that their vendors and agencies are tracking the sales wrong and being rewarded for conversions that were not created through their marketing effort. If you are a marketing director working with an agency, try asking your account managers if they often run into tracking problems. Almost all of the experienced account managers can tell you how messy it can get when it comes to tracking.
Beside the standard Google Analytics, some of the paid tracking systems with high reputations out there are Ominture and Comscore. Many companies actually have huge problem implementing them. On one hand, these software offer a wide ranges of metrics that allow marketers to learn about their customers, but on the other hand, digital marketing get stuck with solving the problem such as why the URLs aren’t being tagged right. For smaller business, Omniture and Comscore are already out of the picture since allocating enough human resources to assure these systems work properly is already over their budget.
What is the key takeaway for this post? I would say the solution is to find the consultant or employee with years of experience in analytics and tracking. If there is marketing budget for doing it right, it is investing in the human resource. Sure there will be more options for simple and low maintenance tracking systems over time, but it takes an experience analyst to assure there is no glitch.
Recent news on Sheryl Sandberg joining the Facebook Board of Directors probably motivates the largest number of female entrepreneurs and leaders within the tech community in 2012. Business owners or online marketers like myself and others, however, have different kind of interest. It is whether Sheryl Sandberg, formerly VP of Online Sale and Operation at Google, will use her past experience to help shape and innovate the Facebook advertising system so that it becomes relevant for both advertisers and the end users. There are definitely places that need improvement and following are some suggestions:
1. Reach advertisers by verticals or by advertisers’ needs: Advertisers who want to sell bags will have different goals than those trying to get exposure for their songs and music shows. It is great that there were a lot of facebook marketing campaigns successfully drove traffic to their page last year, but if all of them were in the entertainment industry, how can business owners and advertisers relate? Building segmented help forums, case studies and researches or emailing lists can be done in order to provide relevant information.
2. Provide better learning experience: Google definitely succeeded at training many search marketers and advocating for the Adwords certification. Facebook needs a similar system and more organized material in order to communicate with advertisers on topics such as ad delivery options. A step by step guide or tutorial videos will be helpful as well.
3. Build ad support team: Similar to Google, Bing, Apple and other companies with excellent customer service, Facebook will need a strong and helpful ad support team as well. As of right now, smaller advertisers and business owners don’t even have an option to email, let alone call Facebook if there is an advertising-related question.
Facebook offers growth opportunities for advertisers through demographic and social targeting options. However, it will take us sometimes to know whether having more targeting options allows better reach or trigger mediocre online marketing and the team at Facebook will help form the answer to that.
