Websites are evolving drastically. Long gone are the days of prompting your computer with a DOS command and logging in to the ‘”worldwide internet”, plodding in some web address and getting a static, one-dimensional website. If you are doing your job correctly, what I just described will make you chuckle in nostalgia. Those were the simple days (well, maybe not SIMPLE exactly). What was simple was measuring a website’s success. If you HAD a website you were ahead of the game. Not anymore…
Interactive websites have changed the landscapes of business, social interaction and entertainment. What isn’t evolving as quickly, is how we are measuring the success of these interactive websites. Yes, the technology is keeping up, but in a largely misleading and sometimes irrelevant way. What many companies are reporting is just smoke and mirrors- aka Vanity Metrics.
If you are taking the step into outsourced marketing metrics you want to be sure you are getting real data versus vanity metrics. You want the efforts an external marketing company is exerting on your behalf to be measured in a meaningful way. Outsourced marketing metrics costs can improve your organization’s bottom line. You need to make sure you are reaping the benefits and reading your data realistically.
Marketing smoke and mirrors – or vanity metrics data – is a disservice to interpreting your marketing value. It is misleading for your internal marketing bottom line, your investors and your customer feedback. When you base your marketing metric efforts on numbers that are not meaningful, are exaggerated or show misleading data, you aren’t optimizing what your organizations potential can truly be.
Your business marketing metrics efforts should be less on baseline numbers and more on engagement. You can watch how people are utilizing your website. Are they just clicking and leaving? Are they engaging your website? Are they staying? Are they retaining value from your website?
Some folks are reporting each and every click as a magic ding in your organization’s favor. Truthfully, your business isn’t benefiting from people that come and go quickly. You don’t benefit from people who sign up for your particular online services and don’t actually utilize it. What you need is a service that factors in the engagement of your viewers, the interaction of your potential customers and your branding.
It’s much more than clicks and downloads. To find out how Witmer Group can optimize your websites’ marketing metrics capacity contact us today.