Measuring Meaningful Impact with Thoughtful Metrics

Marketing is an art form and like any art form, creating something worthwhile takes time. There’s no shortcut to thoughtfulness, and following other people generally leads to uninspired creations.

As the CTO of Sled, makers of high impact mobile advertising, I’m exposed to the inner workings of marketing and advertising on a daily basis. I want to share what I’ve learned and trends I’ve seen in the industry so you can better understand the real core of quality measurment.

The problem with numbers

As the demands of the workplace have accelerated, marketing departments have been forced to deliver more results with fewer dollars and smaller staffs. This has occurred in tandem with the rise of Internet technologies that have enabled real-time tracking of ad performance (impressions and clicks). This has led to a dependency on numbers to create advertisements – instead of thinking about missions and impact, it’s now common practice to create dozens or hundreds of variations of an ad, and pick the winner based on the highest click rate.

The problem with this fast-paced, numbers-based mentality is that it doesn’t actually measure impact. For example, ever wonder why there are so many ads with smiling, photoshopped women? It’s because the numbers show that sex sells.  Pretty much no matter what you’re advertising, if you put a smiling woman in your ad, more people will click it. But will they remember your ad, your product, your mission? Or just the smiling girl?

As much as marketers want to think that someone clicking on their ad indicates interest…it doesn’t. Fraudulent and accidental clicks are rampant in the industry, and most ad impressions aren’t even visible to the user. But those are the only numbers we have access to, so that’s what we optimize on.

Measuring impact is situational

2015 has proven that knowing what to measure has become more challenging than the act of measuring itself. For example my team created a tool called Parsec, where advertisers can buy advertising based on the amount of time users spend with an ad. It’s still not a perfect measurement of impact on a user, but it’s getting closer. In our surveys, we found users to be significantly more likely to remember an ad that they spent more time with.

The benefits of focusing on time spent aren’t limited to paid advertising, either. Medium recently touched on this in their latest article: Medium’s metric that matters: Total Time Reading. What they concluded was that data has reached a tipping point where marketers have more data than ever but no idea what’s actually worth measuring. This lead them to understand that the metric they personally need to be measuring may be different than any other major brand.

Medium decided to form their own metric catered to their core goals. They ended up calling this TTR (total time reading) where they specifically measure data revealing how long users read content on the site. This is what every single marketer needs to be focusing on in the coming years. As more and more data becomes available to us the real quest we must undertake is not finding it but knowing which data is worth our time.

Reapproaching the tried and true

You likely have a few core metrics you’ve been focusing on the past couple years like we all do However with the new year rolling in perhaps now is a better time than any to take a step back and reexamine your true priorities in this data flooded landscape.

So, next time you’re designing paid ads, writing a blog post, or crafting a tweet… pause for a moment before you send it out. Go for a walk. Take a stretch break. Grab lunch. And think about what improvements you can make so that users want to spend more time with your creation – not just click it because there’s a smiling woman.

Usually acting on what grabs the most numbers is our initial instinct. When we begin to measure metrics like time on page + bounce rate we’ll start understanding if our content is actually resonating with our viewers on a deeper level.