Imagine you’re driving from Chicago to St. Louis to meet an old friend for dinner. To effectively calculate whether you’re on target to meet your stated objective (arriving in St. Louis by 5:00pm), the only instruments you would need are your car’s clock, its speedometer and the gas gauge. By monitoring these devices, you could easily determine whether any adjustments would need to be made in your travel plans — leave a bit earlier, increase your speed (slightly), take shorter and/or fewer rest stops, etc.
Now, imagine that you sit down in the driver’s seat of your car, and the dashboard looks like the cockpit of a Boeing 747. With hundreds of dials, levers and gauges. It would be overwhelming. In fact, it would likely impede your ability to meet your objective.
This may seem like an extreme example, but this is the way many marketers choose to manage their online advertising campaigns. With a heightened desire to prove ROI, and accessibility to campaign-level data at a moment’s notice, online marketers are spending enormous amounts of time trying to make sense of all the data.
Many of today’s marketers are consumed with finding their answer to the question that plagued John Wanamaker at the turn of the last century. However, instead of finding the necessary insight (from the data) to eliminate advertising waste, they often find themselves too confused to make ANY decisions about campaign optimization at all.
The reason: they’re looking at too much stuff…Impressions, Clicks, Visits, CTRs, Pageviews, CPCs, CPAs, CPVs, Time-on-Site, Bounce Rates, Referring Source, Recency, Visitor Loyalty, and on, and on, and on. And worse, they don’t always know why they’re looking at all this stuff.
Obviously, information is good, but information is not the same as insight. Too much information can actually cause indecision. This is often known as "paralysis by analysis," a phrase applied when the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds its benefits.
Remember, campaign optimization is not a destination, it is a process. It requires clear establishment (up front) of the metrics you will leverage to assess the present state of performance, and to prescribe a course of action.
Any metric that is reported on should have a purpose that is understood by anyone involved in managing (or funding) the campaign. Simply put, any metric that is reported on should be actionable. Otherwise, ignore it.
