Marketing Operations

The numbers were going up.

An international business coach watched followers, engagement and traffic rise for years. The analytics were correctly installed and the figures were accurate. The business was not selling.

Nobody inside had ever suspected anything.

Marketing is the delivery system. Messaging is what is delivered. Impressions, reach, engagement and sessions all measure the delivery system. Not one of them says whether what arrived meant anything to the person it reached.

And when a business aims its marketing at a cheaper tier than its product, those numbers do not merely fail to inform. They rise as it drifts further from its buyer.

• Four instruments that sit outside your reporting, because a measurement problem cannot be audited using the measurement
• Why a falling number starts an investigation and a rising one never does
• Two attribution models on identical data, and an optimum that was the reverse of both
• The eBay experiment: what a large share of attributed conversions were never worth
• One measured reason none of this gets fixed, across twenty six million accounts