Is the Digital Marketing Juice Worth the Squeeze?
Over the years, I've heard the odd saying "is the juice worth the squeeze?" It's usually said by folks who are wondering whether the effort they are about to expend is justified by the potential outcomes. Those folks are also the ones looking for shortcuts, quick wins, and "lazy-way-out's." Turns out, this phrase is perfectly applicable to digital marketing. On the one hand, digital marketing has made marketing as easy as set-it-and-forget-it. On the other hand, digital marketing has made marketing appear to produce incredible outcomes, because "more is always better" right? So the digital marketing juice (outcomes) has appeared to be worth the squeeze (effort, what effort) for the last two decades.
But let's dig a little deeper and peel back the onion a bit more, shall we?
Vanity Metrics are the Overt Consumption of Digital Marketing
Just like "overt consumption" -- flaunting your Gucci handbag while walking down the street -- vanity metrics from digital marketing make you look good to your boss, adds to your job security, and even gets you the promotion. Yay! But what if someone looked more closely and saw that the handbag was Cucci, not Gucci, and the large numbers reported in digital metrics didn't correspond to more business outcomes? Vanity metrics are the "overt consumption" of digital marketing; they make you "look like a million bucks" on the outside, but they are just large numbers on screen or in spreadsheets. It's just like playing video games, instead of doing actual marketing. Higher scores, more coins collected, and bonus points all help you win in the video game and make you feel good too. The same applies to metrics and analytics in digital marketing. If you look at those large numbers as the "juice" you will think it's "worth the squeeze."
But as we've seen over the years, fake accounts, fake likes, fake views, fake followers, etc. abound in social media -- from this NYTimes expose' "Follower Factory" to Facebook's own numbers, reported in their Transparency Center. Every quarter, they remove over 1 billion fake accounts; over 6 billion fake accounts were removed in 2021. This gives you a sense of the scale of the fake follower, fake likes, and fake views problem. Obviously Facebook is not the only social media network with this problem. If Facebook, which has the strictest policies and best technologies to prevent fake account creation has this big of a problem, imagine the size the problem for other social networks like TikTok. Fake accounts inflate metrics like followers, likes, views, etc. But those larger numbers -- fake juice -- don't mean better digital marketing; they just made it appear to be worth the squeeze.
The mirage of reach and frequency
Marketers have been like "moths drawn to the light" for years, because of these large numbers -- not only the appearance of "scale" in the audience sizes, but also the appearance of "engagement" from the follows, likes, and clicks. It certainly looked good and felt good when their digital marketing appeared to generate more followers for their accounts, more likes on their posts, and clicks on their ads. But you should keep in mind that these numbers are juiced, if you will, by bot activity. Not only do bots create fake accounts by the billions, bots also view webpages to create fake ad impressions and click on the ads to create the appearance of engagement. Large numbers of ad impressions bought and sold through ad exchanges, generated enormous revenues for adtech companies over the last decade. Even if those companies -- like ad exchanges -- were not the ones that created, maintained, and used bot nets to generate fraudulent ad impressions, they certainly benefitted from "others" that were juicing their numbers -- sites that used bot traffic to generate ad impressions to sell through ad exchanges.
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These juiced metrics, and the juiced revenues that resulted from them, were and are the "Cucci handbags" they flaunt in quarterly SEC filings. Yeah, some of these are public companies. Advertisers could say they relied on the juiced metrics like MAUs ("monthly active users") and DAUs ("daily active users") numbers in those SEC filings to plan their media buying and estimate the prices to pay. Those numbers were juiced -- inflated -- by fake accounts and bot activity, so 1) their media plans were flawed, 2) they spent more money than they needed to, and 3) they paid for something they thought was real, but turned out to be fake. Note that some advertisers want to buy the low priced digital ads and hope no one would notice there were no business outcomes just like some consumers want to buy the $30 "Gucci" handbag and hope no one would notice it actually says Cucci. The question is, do you want the large numbers (fake juice) or do you want real business outcomes (real juice)? Are you playing a video game called digital marketing (fake squeezing) or are you doing real marketing (real squeezing)?
So What?
To finish this juicing analogy, which has certainly paid juicy dividends in this article, do more squeezing; do better squeezing. Real digital marketing requires real effort -- i.e. real squeezing. Some of this may feel like hard work, especially if you haven't been doing it before. But the real juice is worth a real, hard squeeze. That means look at the analytics yourself; don't pawn that off to someone else like your media agency. That means measure real business outcomes. Yes, this is hard to do, unlike vanity metrics which are "easy-peasy lemon-squeezy" -- easy to measure and easy to report. But doing it right is "worth the squeeze."
Make yourself look good to your bosses by taking the extra step and go beyond "that's the way we've done it for years." Be the marketer that measures for incrementality, even if it's hard to do. Look at analytics yourself to better understand how digital works and if it is working for your company's bottom line. Add to your own job security by finding the small numbers that are meaningful. Dispense with the large number vanity metrics, because sooner or later, someone will notice it's Cucci and not Gucci. Get yourself the promotion for finding the lemon that's worth the squeeze.
And let me know what you think of all the squeezing above and also of the two additional, related, articles below. ;-)
And if you're ready to take next steps, here are some practical ways to optimize your digital campaigns today. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/motivational-speaker-digital-way-dr-fou-augustine-fou/