Digital marketing may be taking over the world but most companies are “pissing in the wind” when it comes to deciding where they should be targeting their spend as they are clueless about which areas are most effective.
Back in the 1880s, US businessman John Wanamaker famously coined the phrase, “I know half of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half” but if the latest study by Keynote is anything to go by, the situation has actually got much, much worse.
With digital marketing’s very raison d’être being that everything is measurable, the study found that 78% of marketers do not believe their organisations have the digital performance analytics capabilities needed to inform digital strategy now or in the foreseeable future.
The study, carried out by Forrester, also found that almost half (45%) of organisations had or did not know if they had a digital performance issue over the previous 12 months.
While organisations note the importance of the customer experience as a measure of digital success, they do not recognise the same value of customer experience metrics.
In fact, when asked to rank the most important metrics to measure and guide success of digital strategy, respondents listed customer experience metrics as the fifth (responsiveness) and sixth (customer satisfaction or app ratings) most important. The top three most important metrics were viewed as new user growth, average cost per acquired customer and repeat visitors.
“The digital transformation mandate is now well known. However, as the study from Forrester reinforces, the success of digital initiatives is wholly dependent on the customer experience,” said Aaron Rudger, director of product marketing, Keynote.
“Without equal visibility into digital performance, organisations will struggle to meet customer expectations in the new digital norm, and risk losing business to competitors who can.”
