Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

I've been in the digital analytics space for a really long time. But even after all of these years, I am shocked to find how many organizations think that their digital analytics data is accurate.

Guess what - it isn't!

It never was and it's getting worse by the day.

It's getting worse because privacy regulations are making it more difficult to track users. It's getting worse because users are switching between multiple devices which makes identity resolution more difficult. It's getting worse because (thanks to AI) bots are getting smarter and more difficult to block.

And, by the way, even if you mitigate the preceding issues, your digital analytics data may be inaccurate due to human/organizational/implementation issues (take it from me who made a lot of consulting money showing organizations how bad their digital analytics implementations were!).

So does that mean that you should give up on digital analytics? Throw your hands up in vain and go back to just trusting your gut with key digital business decisions? Of course not! You just need to accept the fact that your digital analytics data will always be flawed and that it is meant to be directional, not 100% accurate.

But I often see digital analytics teams that are obsessed with 100% accurate digital data. If it isn't exact, their internal stakeholders won't use it. I recently spoke to an organization whose digital analytics team was scolded by its stakeholders because numbers in their digital analytics tool were 2% off from what was in their data warehouse. In my opinion, this isn't a tool or data quality issue as much as it is a change management issue. In this case, I don't believe that the analytics team and its leadership have set the correct expectations around digital data.

In the early days of advertising when television commercials were king, Nielsen used an "audimeter on a small number of homes to report on what tv shows were watched. Massive advertising budget decisions were made on a super small sample size of the millions of homes in the United States. It's amazing to me how far the pendulum has swung in terms of data coverage and accuracy during my lifetime!

Today, many organizations spend so much time arguing about the accuracy of data that they lose sight of the big picture - they should be using the data to promote change within their digital products with the hopes that this change improves conversion or customer experiences. As they say with horseshoes and hand grenades - close is good enough. Don't make perfect is the enemy of good.

I can assure you that if your website homepage has an 90% bounce rate, but you aren't sure if you are capturing data from every user hitting the website, your home page probably stinks! Having 100% accuracy would not suddenly show you that your homepage is awesome. If your orders or leads in your digital analytics tool are slightly off from your backend, it doesn't mean that all data in your digital analytics tool is worthless.

So as you fight the good fight in the digital analytics arena, keep in mind that digital data is just one input into business decisions and that directional insights can be extremely valuable. Remember to always set expectations around digital data and remind your stakeholders that they have almost no data on in-person channel interactions. Stand up for your digital analytics team and find ways to turn data into insights that drive real change for the organization. That's much more fun than constantly arguing over data accuracy...