Commentary
Your Consumer Is As Your Consumer Does
- by Kendall Allen , September 13, 2010
We've all been subjected to the "fans and friends" outburst -- whether as an agency, a peer, or in casual cocktail conversation with self-made celebrities of the digital age. Sound
familiar?: "We got 200 fans overnight." Or, "I'm doing really well. I have 1,000 friends and my page has 100 more fans than my competition." But, unless the marketer or
celebrity can transform that passive attention into action, no one can be sure that fandom and friending count.
There's something we talk about a lot when it comes to "channel
planning," that somewhat conventional but utterly valuable discipline of slowing down and planning based on where your consumer really tends to spend time. And that something is:
mindset. It's merely a start to know which channels and platforms your consumer prefers. There's more that should concern you.
What is their mindset when they are there,
and how do we respect and engage with that mindset when marketing in these environments? What do they want to do -- and what do they actually do -- when traversing these channels? Really, their liking
you means nothing until you know these things.
After what seems like 100 of these vapid declarations of fans and friends success, I was somewhat heartened by an article I saw last week,
published by eMarketer: "The Thin Line Between Liking a Brand and Liking its Social Marketing." It's one of the few pieces
I've seen that rounds up the findings of various reports detailing the kinds of activities "liking" a brand might spur. It specifically focuses on ExactTarget's "Subscribers, Fans and Followers" report. The report shows there's an intricate array of interests and motivations potentially
symbolized by the "like," with the desire for receiving promotions ranking highest. These include an interest in updates on company news, upcoming sales, exclusive content. A desire to
interact ranked the lowest. For me, the report reinforces that a brand cannot assume that a "like" holds a consumer's full spectrum A-Z of interest just because she likes you.
It's more a la carte.
Yes, if you stop to think about it, this all seems obvious. But we have seen this short-sightedness before: click-through rate, anyone? We all know that as a
metric, the CTR is practically meaningless. Yet it's one of the first things a new digital marketer will latch onto out of the gate, no matter how much time has been spent discussing objectives
and establishing valid performance indicators. We've seen many a marketer stay obsessed with the CTR longer than is healthy.
We've been trying to end the conversation for years,
but this aimless exuberance for the CTR has persisted. Yes, click-through volume and trending is interesting on some level. But, more importantly, what does the visitor do? What happens on
touchdown or on that path to conversion? Does a visitor return? Explore the site for more than three seconds and three pages? Join your community? Comment? Become an advocate? Click, click, and
purchase? Purchase again next month? Those are the doings that matter.
As with the CTR, so goes the "like." Smart marketers, unite. We must have a higher standard for
engagement, which we're still trying to define as an industry anyway. A passing glance, a wink or even a tap on the shoulder don't just translate to lasting love. You want the follow-through
-- any number of tangible "I dos."
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Kendall, marketing metrics rarely describe what actually works for advertisers and far more frequently describe what can be sold to advertisers. The CTR has fallen from grace for one reason and one reason only: marketers can no longer sell it to advertisers because it now performs at statistical zero.
If the CTR was still at 3-5% instead of .1%, would you and the rest of the digital marketing world be so quick to dismiss it? True enough, what happens in the post-click engagement is important, but there is no engagement in the first place without the initial click, only an impression, and -- as we all know -- an online impression is like the tree that falls in the forest when no one is around to hear it.
If nothing else, the CTR tells us whether or not the bait we dangle in front of consumers to elicit their response is working. Obviously it's not. But we can't keep shooting the messenger every time we don't like the message. Consequently, the effort to jettison the CTR as a meaningful metric is disingenuous at best.
It's fine to promote a higher standard for the engagement, but sacking the CTR en route just because we can no longer sell it to our own hapless clients does both them and ourselves a disservice.
Jeff:
A rate alone doesn't tell the click's story. The rate is a partial indicator -- but says nothing of relative volume. 3-5%=what? That bit is often skipped in the knee-jerk assessment by a wide-eyed marketer. The CTR alone says nothing about trending or other composite analysis.
Even before we get to engagement, which know I mentioned here, there's a data context around the click "rate" that matters. Right?
In isolation, a metric that pertains only to rate is meaningless. I think we've all seen this rate regarded with undue singular importance. That leads down a questionable path.
I think we have to be careful also to not dismiss criticism of a myopic view on this "metric" as some sort of popular rant. Metrics have grown up just as the ad economy has. Isolated regard for CTR is just small in a more mature context.
K
Kendall, apologies for the delayed response.
Any metric in isolation is meaningless, but the real value of the CTR as a meaningful metric is embodied in how it measures the ability of an ad or other unit to elicit a specific interactive response in spite and irrespective of context.
No one ever suggested that the CTR should tell the whole story, but to dismiss it because it doesn't suggests that we should dismiss every other metric for the exact same reason. None of them tell the whole story, but only the CTR is singled out for derision. And only the CTR offers any indication of an ad unit's ability to elicit an interactive response in an interactive medium -- again, in spite and irrespective of context.
Moreover, marketing metrics don't grow up, they merely seek relative levels of expediency as tools in the sales chain. The more sales they generate the more popular they become -- and vice versa. Contrary to the self-serving rationale of the entire digital media industry, the CTR died not because it was replaced with more "mature" metrics, but because digital ad sales folks simply can't justify a performance level of statistical zero to their clients.