Digital Lab

Digital marketing has made it the easiest time in human history to grow a business… It’s also never been easier to do it wrong.

With digital marketing comes analytics platforms like Google Analytics 4, TripleWhale, Meta Business Suite, Shopify, Wordpress, and so many more.

At first glance, this is a great thing.

Detailed numbers to review and reflect on why different campaigns are or aren’t working.

However, the problem is that these tools rarely tell the true story.

They only tell you the story that a computer can see.

Let me explain…

How Tracking Works

Platforms like Google Analytics track user sessions on webpages and 1000s of different metrics associated with their session.

How long they are on the page, what they look at, what they interact with, and ultimately where they came from.

This last bit is used by digital marketers to determine what marketing campaign to give “credit” to when a purchase is completed.

The problem is that this analysis isn’t always true.

Let’s say you’re texting with your friend, and they recommend a great Sushi place downtown.

They send you a link to the shop’s website. You browse the menu for a bit and spot something that you think may be good for dinner later.

A few hours later, you’re ready to order dinner, so you do a quick Google Search for the company, find it on Google Maps, call them, and place a to-go order.

A digital marketer may classify this as an “organic search” lead and tie the purchase back to a search campaign. However, this is obviously a referral.

Examples just like this are happening every minute across ad campaigns, organic campaigns, and even physical campaigns like direct mail.

So what’s the solution?

The Un-Trackable

Many actions you may take before buying a product or service are completely untrackable.

Talking with a friend over lunch, hearing an ad on the radio, seeing someone else you know making a purchase, seeing a good review on YouTube, etc.

And then, when the seller decides to put on a flash sale at 20% off, you take the opportunity to make your first purchase.

If that seller is looking at the data, they’re going to think that the discount was a huge hit and the secret to their growth. Ignoring the fact that you may have been warming up to them for 6 months prior to purchasing and the discount was only a tiny impact on your purchase.

The uncomfortable truth is that there is no way to fix this problem.

There is no way to 100% verifiably know what your entire customer journey looks like.

When you invest in awareness campaigns (those that help new people discover you), they rarely report revenue. In most cases, they may seem like a complete waste of money on a dashboard.

Recently, we had a client that started running YouTube ads. After about 6 weeks, they hadn’t reported a single dollar from the campaign.

The dashboard looked pretty ugly.

However, we ran a survey of their recent customers and asked them how they discovered the brand.

A disproportionate amount of their customers heard about the brand for the first time on YouTube.

(The client doesn’t do anything else on YouTube except these ads)

So turns out the YouTube campaign had generated thousands in new revenue and over 100 customers.

That campaign is now getting more budget and more push even though it continues to reflect zero return in all modern analytics dashboards.

The Take-Away

Don’t be afraid to invest in things that don’t show revenue in an analytics tool.

Experiment with your customers, ask for their feedback, and get to the truth.

There’s a difference between a dashboard reporting “more revenue than last month” and an actual significant contribution to new revenue.

Here’s a visual I’ve always loved:

Dashboards tend to blur the line between “new” revenue and just “shifting” revenue.

Google ads report more revenue, but SEO efforts report less; it’s the same revenue (just moving around).

What will always be true is your customers’ voice.

Why did they buy, how did they discover you, and what was the tipping point?

Are you taking a thoughtful approach to your marketing? Or just living by a dashboard?

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