How audience targeting and marketing attribution metrics have failed us
There was something hopeful about things like Google Analytics, attribution models and account based marketing.
Each time marketers excitedly proclaimed, “Now we’ll be able to measure what’s really going on.”
I’ve been working in marketing a long time. I remember the novelty of basic click metrics from early digital ads and email marketing. And this thing called a spider magically wove website metrics.
“You mean you can accurately measure impressions for ads? Like it’s not a wild guess like print ads, billboards, earned media and event sponsorships?”
Except, all these years later we know it’s really not accurate. Even if you discount potential ad fraud—and you should not ignore ad fraud—there’s a lot of other things going on. Ad blockers, scroll throughs, accidental clicks, and ad conversions that are not quality traffic.
There’s also the larger valuation problem with programmatic advertising. Not to mention the inability for programmatic ad infrastructure to provide brand safe environments.
Marketers focused on measuring everything got a one year reprieve on losing their cookies. But layered on top of this was Apple Mail Privacy Protection’s humongous metric busting update. (Let’s be real. Opens and clicks were already problematic due to spam filters and malware protection, especially for B2B.)
It’s time for to collectively wake up and realize we need to refocus on the humans behind the screens.
What would happen if marketers voluntarily adopted privacy-minded tracking of ads, web analytics and inbound marketing?
What would happen if sales professionals did the same for account based marketing and outbound sales?
What would happen if instead of pushing a targeted (and yet still invasive) agenda, we decided to talk with people who want to talk with us?
Remember when the internet was bright and shiny and new? The awe as we envisioned people connecting over common interests. Information was more readily available (to at least some people). It was a beautiful thing.
Audience targeting came out of that place. It provided a way to deliver the proverbial right message to the right person at the right time. Google Zero Moment of Truth originally meant something good, right? But it can also go wildly wrong. Like when Planters Peanuts targets me with a Twitter ad because I tweeted about … my son’s peanut allergy.
A big focus on inbound marketing seemed like a good idea. It provided a way to combat invasive advertising and sales tactics. However, even that has become commoditized, cheapened, invasive and abused. Content gating creates a loop you can’t escape from. It assumes an interest in one helpful guide means implied permission for every email send ever.
If marketers are going to let go of not super successful — and invasive — ad and sales tactics, we also need to let go of not great inbound marketing tactics. These include pretty crappy content, over use of gated content, over the top follow-up with retargeting ads and more.
We know that many of these tactics don’t even work the way they are supposed to.
I used to be a fan of retargeting at a time when it was used in a more focused way. I browse an ecommerce site (eshakti.com) and then see an ad for the thing I was looking at. I may or may not buy the thing. (They make dresses based on your measurements—with pockets! So, yes, I often bought the thing.) Eventually I stop seeing the ad. That is a valid, helpful and appropriate original use for retargeting.
SaaS retargeting never seems to stop. And I get it, SaaS marketing is like a machine. The finickiness of cross-device and cross-browser tracking means I’m still targeted for SaaS ads with a vendor I already use.
Targeted advertising is no more fool proof than broader advertisings tactics. And it’s still prone to the same human error. Whoops, someone forgot to upload the recent purchases list as an exclude.
It’s time to stop pretending digital advertising, audience targeting and website analytics are fool proof. (Or incorrectly labeling bad habits ABM and hoping no one will notice we’re doing the same things and calling them something different.)
We also need to stop a whole slew of really bad marketing habits. These were born from trying to track everything and then realizing we had metric gaps, unreliable data and invasive data that didn’t tell us much. So we backfilled with some truly awful habits.
I call this Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad? syndrome. You know from Community?
We need to start a more human approach to marketing with bounded optimism.
Have any ideas for how to do this? I’d love to know what they are.
