Interpreting Marketing Data - You're Doing it Wrong

This week Marketo held their annual conference, Marketing Nation. There were over 6,000 registrants, Hillary Clinton was a keynote speaker, and everyone I spoke with at the event seemed really happy.

During the event there were lots of fun and engaging activities including an evening gala at the well-known San Francisco Exploratorium, a recharge lounge to relax and charge your accessories, a candy bar, games and prizes in the expo area, and a pretty cool augmented reality wall.

For those that don’t know, augmented reality (according to Wikipedia) is a view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. In this case, Marketo had worked with an artist to design a fun piece of art, that when viewed through a special application on an iphone or tablet made the art-piece interactive. You could see parts of the art moving, find out about special offers, and learn about highlights of the event.

I’m not surprised Marketo created this wall, as augmented reality is pretty hot right now, and often drives a big crowd.

This wall was meant to be fun, as well as create buzz around the expo hall and drive traffic to some of the higher paying sponsors of the event. While I don’t know the exact costs of this wall, I understand it was not cheap, and that Marketo also had to incur costs beyond the wall itself because of transporting, staffing, and the associated prizes.

The metrics used to determine ROI of this spend and ultimately if they create and use augmented reality in their marketing programs going forward would likely include:

• Number of people who participated
• Number of leads driven to partner booths
• Number of people who participated in the raffle for prizes associated with the wall
• Number of people that talk about the wall in social channels

Now I can tell you just from watching this area that the results aren't going to be great. It was only being engaged with by a few people at a time, with most walking right past the wall because it was a bit hidden and out of view. Further, partners were mentioning to me that this was unsuccessful and they weren't even aware of the interactive nature, believing it was just some creative design on the wall.

Now, if you remember, I started this post saying others have had great success with augmented reality. So what will the metrics really telling us here?

Marketers might conclude that this type of program is not a fit, that augmented reality is not a traffic driver, and that the spend on this program was bad. This would then suggest that even though many of the costs for this were fixed and already paid, and that the wall could likely be used again at another event with a much smaller cost (just switching out the offers to be relevant to the new event), that Marketo should skip it as part of their programs.

I’m not sure this is correct. I believe the results will not actually tell us anything about this program other than: 1. The wall was placed in a poor area where traffic didn’t notice the wall and 2. Because it looked like a piece of art, people didn’t understand that there was something more special about it.

So, should Marketo do this again? Well, only if they work out these bugs.

The true point here is that the numbers don’t always tell you what they think they do, and that you often have to understand the bigger picture. We see this all the time when a trade show doesn’t yield great results, or an online ad doesn’t drive the right traffic. It may not be that the program was wrong, or that a channel doesn’t work, but that something else was not executed in the best way possible. In these cases, the trade show booth may not have had the right message, or you may not have signed up in time to get a good booth location. The online ad may have been poorly designed or be targeted the wrong way. It's important to be able to see that the program itself may be able to be salvaged by taking a different approach.

So please, remember that the numbers only point towards an issue, and may not tell the whole story. Don’t just run a report and decide to exclude a channel or major program. Instead, dig in and use the data to uncover the real story so you can further improve and enhance your company’s marketing.

Images from AugementedArt.