A lot of people claim that digital marketing is measurable. Even professional digital marketers fall into the trap of believing that everything in digital marketing is measurable. We even believe that it’s the factor that makes digital marketing greater than any other forms of marketing. However, measurement ability is not everything and we are not ACTUALLY able to measure everything in our SEO and digital marketing campaigns. Sure, we can track a lot of things but there are a lot of things that are still part if the digital marketing world that we have a hard time tracking. These involve stuff that happens on different devices, brand awareness and its impact on conversion rate, lifetime value and order value, benefits of impressions that are not clicked and so on.
What Makes Us Believe Otherwise?
All of these things we cannot accurately track of measure, and yet we believe that everything in the digital marketing world is measurable. The things mentioned above just means that the stuff most digital marketers report on are just focused on direct returns, not the total returns. If you are a business owner, it’s easy to get confused, with all the anchoring bias going on. When we do anchoring, we tend to be fixated on the first number we see or hear and then we make estimates that are not accurate. Eventually, this will result in having the measured value seen as the maximum result when actually the result and the potential is so much greater. This is obviously a mistake because the returns of investment we think we get are often enough, so we get lazy. We just become satisfied with the returns we are getting for the business when actually, we can push it more and squeeze more returns from our campaigns. Therefore, we set our goals based on the measurable values of digital marketing and it’s clipping our wings and holding our business down.
Why Should We NOT Rely on Measurements?
If we continue relying on exact measurements when it comes to returns we get from SEO it can pose a threat to the entire digital marketing campaign. We can end up spending a lot of money unnecessarily, and the measurability itself will become a threat to your campaign. How is this possible? As you probably know by now, there are already existing threats to measuring accurately, such as technological, regulatory and the behavior of users itself. If your campaign experience issues with all of this, you can lose the entirety of your data. When you do, and you are relying so much on measurability, you will probably shut down your website blindly. You might also stop marketing altogether. But you should not do that. The value of digital marketing and of SEO does not stop at its measurability. You may think that it’s impossible to note the value of your SEO campaign unless you track the interactions it causes. However, that way of thinking will lead you to the wrong path. You can prove that the value of digital marketing exists, even if you can’t measure it literally.
How To Determine The Value of Your Digital Marketing Campaign
There are two ways you can determine the value of your digital marketing. One is to figure out the value of brand awareness and two is in understanding how digital marketing and other digital activities are changing such awareness. If you are not familiar how brand value works, you must know that a lot of large companies place 75% of enterprise value in their brand. You can see that brand awareness has a lot of value in itself. There are a lot of methods that can be used to measure changes in brand awareness. However, your priority might be in figuring out what marketing strategy to carry out to make significant changes in brand awareness. You can use either the Sherlock approach or the aggressive attribution approach. What are these?
- SherlockWith this approach, you can take the total new revenue acquired within a certain period, subtract from it the amount attributed to other channels and what remains will be counted as the brand value. If you keep doing this method and it proves to be stable and predictable, you can then use it as baseline value in measuring changes in brand awareness.
- Aggressive AttributionFor aggressive attribution approach, you can take the total revenue and divide it between the different acquisition channels.The thing is, even these methods tend to under-represent brand value, despite being aggressive. There are also other methods where brand obviously drives search volume, but at this time, it’s very difficult to measure.
Justifying SEO Investment
As budget limitations are more emphasized, you might have to justify your SEO investment. If you won’t rely on the measurability of your digital marketing campaign, how can you answer when you are asked what you’re getting for your SEO investment. For sure, this is one of the most difficult questions to answer regarding SEO. Of course, there are platforms available now that help makes SEO investments measurable, accountable and quantifiable. However, finding an answer regarding ROI for your SEO investment is never easy.
It is important to look at the big picture though. Nowadays, Facebook and Google are continuously growing in terms of being a source of traffic and value for your business. However, when it comes to Facebook ads, only 3-4% of searches result in clicks, while Google’s outbound referral traffic is steadily growing. This is actually a huge opportunity for brands to play it smart. While your competitors are spending time and money on Facebook, which is a social space, you can also capitalize on Google using SEO.
While it is not completely measurable, the results are undeniable, and this option has infinite potential as well. Don’t make the mistake of believing that digital marketing is all about measurability. Don’t miss opportunities just because you can’t measure some elements. Remember that the elements that you cannot fully track have their own potentials to produce excellent returns for your business as well.
