What on Earth Do Impressions, Engagement, and Clicks Really Mean?

Marketing for me has always been an essential of any business, the need to generate new business, new logos. Marketing is front and centre all companies, large and small.

Having worked in sales all my life, since I was a rookie salesperson I set myself a task to master “Marketing”, you might call it demand generation, desire building, or prospecting. All of those things, should be the conversation starters that start a “sales” process. Also, in my experience, regardless of what size company I worked for, it was down to me to do the marketing or prospecting.

I’ve found the “language” of marketing, something that I’ve needed to try and master. I assumed that hidden amongst all that jargon there were gems of knowledge that I needed to understand. Since my early twenties I have read sales and marketing books, looking for techniques I could use. One of my favourite books, which is 21 years old this year is “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin.

The essence of this book is that people don’t want to be interrupted, they want to form relationships with people, something even more relevant in the social media age, where buyers have access to an infinite amount of content and can research buying products and services all in salesperson avoidance mode. 

I was sitting in a presentation recently and three words came up. You know when you hear a word and you think you know what it means, but maybe you don’t, there is an ambiguity. 

The three words are “Impressions”, “Engagement” and “Clicks”.

We all know what these mean don’t we? Or maybe we don’t, so let’s explore them in more detail.

Impressions - Let’s assume that you have paid for an advertisement on Linkedin.

As a user of Linkedin, I will have my timeline. This is made up of posts from connections and posts that are from connections of connections. For example, if I am connected to you and you like a post of somebody I am not connected to then it can show up in my timeline. The objective here is to give the timeline more sense of “randomness” but it also puts more and varied content in front of you. Content from your network and content from your network’s, network.

If you buy adverts, you can interrupt that stream of content with your message.

On Linkedin, if I scroll through my timeline and your advert is seen on my timeline then that is an “impression”.

I might be scrolling through my timeline and I think all the content and the advert is boring and has nothing to do with me. Even if I ignore you advert, this is still counted as an impression. Me scrolling past your advert, does not show intent to buy. But it’s measured as an impression. Now everybody I’ve spoken to say “why would you measure that? it’s meaningless?”. It is, but it’s measured and for some reason I don’t understand people present this to Boards of companies as if it has a meaning. Scary eh?

Let’s move to “Engagement”.

Engagement is where you might “hover” over the ad, or dwell. It might be if the phone rings and you have been scrolling through your news feed and the phone rings and your scrolling might slow down. It does not show intent to buy. Again, a fairly meaningless metric, but again this is printed to the C-Suite as if this is people queuing around the block to buy. It’s not.

Let’s move to “Clicks”.

Clicks are were you might click on an ad. Clearly this is where I have seen something that perhaps might be of interest and certainly I’m a lot closer to becoming a customer if I’ve clicked something than if I’ve seen it (and possibly not even registered what it was) or dwelled on it for a moment (possibly by coincidence or accident) but I’m still not showing much commitment.

For example, I’ve been on the Bugatti website and I can’t afford one, I’ve been on competitors website and I’m certainly not a prospect and I’ve been on your website…simply because I’m putting a list of potential features together to form part of the tender.

I have also, coincidentally, decided that you will not be invited to tender. But this is all being collated and present to leadership teams that this is another metric we should be proud of and shows there will be a “surge” of people buying.

The Scary Thing About Marketing Today

I think that many marketing departments know they have a tenuous relationship to value within the business. I have a friend, a Marketing Leader,who still does email marketing and he says "email marketing does not work", but he does it because he is able to measure the response and he submits that to the Board to show that marketing is “doing something". It justifies his existence, nothing more.

In sales, I have to sell something to be measured, which is the way it should be. But my friend admits he gets a “pat on the back” for nothing, certainly nothing that will move the dial in terms of leads. 

So What About The Measurement of All These Impressions, Engagement and Clicks?

I don’t know what the budget for this was but I do know that they achieved quarter of a million impressions. I also know that this resulted in a 0.5% download rate of a pdf. And this was being reported as a success.

I know that where I come from a 99.5% failure rate isn’t a success.

In the words of John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) — 'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?'

Marketing Doesn't Work Anymore

My point is, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. Where an organisation is caught between what they did and what they know they need to do there is an area of calm water where nothing seems to be happening and I expect that this organisation is in exactly that place now. No matter which way you cut it 99% failure rate isn’t sustainable for any business and the sooner they recognise this the better or run out of cash.

The problem is though that in the move to social you can’t get a little bit pregnant. You have to make the decision and take the plunge. This company is hoping that the corporate-account-running-inmail-sending-automated-personalisation strategy will help bridge the gap between the old way of working and the new. But however much you want that to be the case though it simply won’t work. This marketing-run centralised approach has netted barely more than 20 new targeted connections, whereas the sales teams that are social selling have achieved an average of 500 new targeted connections per person.

The Role of Marketing

This doesn’t mean that marketing doesn’t have a role, but it does meant that marketing will need to take a different sort of role from now on. A role of guiding providing insights, empowering, stirring and reporting/measuring.

At a fundamental level there is a risk that marketing can end-up being seen as a cost rather than an investment because it used to be the case that marketing would create desire and qualify prospects and then those leads would be passed to sales.

And this worked because the buyer wasn’t empowered and because it was difficult to find who your competitors were and because there was no way of seeing whether you were telling the truth or not. “We are the market leader with 100% satisfaction guaranteed” would be a tough stamens to disprove. Now of course marketing is in many cases an additional step between the salesperson and the prospect that simply isn’t needed because the prospect can find the seller and the seller can find the prospect…

It was Peter Drucker who said “what gets measured, gets improved.” But it seems to me that these measures have been invented to try and prove that marketing is doing something.

Here we are in the middle of a Pandemic and we are burning through cash with little understanding of the modern buyer and what works in 2020 and that needs to change.