Analytics: Culture or Cult?

An article in Sunday's New York Times asks an interesting question if you're in the business of Web marketing: Can you pay too much attention to your customers?

The Web gives us the power to analyze every single click on every single link of every page in every single campaign. There has been nothing like it in the history of advertising ... no focus group, no survey, no eyeball tracking, nothing.

For marketers, this of course is the Holy Grail: real, objective feedback in real time. The kind of stuff you can use to tweak a campaign for maximum performance and know right away, bottom line, whether you got it right or wrong.

For creatives, it can be a nightmare. There's there's no place to hide. The feedback is instantaneous, brutal and real.

Can it also be wrong?

In the article, one of Google's top visual designers, who says Google wouldn't let him move an em dash without checking the data, couldn't take it any longer and left for a presumably looser gig at Twitter. For this designer, Google crossed the line between using data to drive results and using it to drive people nuts.

What are the casualties of a culture of analytics, other than the psyches of writers and designers? Can there be great online ideas that don't test well, but accomplish other goals, less tied to clickstreams and conversion rates?

At my last job we dealt with this question daily, through all the various channels wrapped up in a massive corporate Web site. Results could mean anything from a shopping cart click to (I hate to admit it but it's true} an attaboy from senior management. We had to figure out when to test things, when to be slaves to the data, and when to just go with what looks cool.

Jason Burby, a friend of mine in the analytics business, wrote a great book on this subject that explores the dilemma. It suggests some disciplines that should be brought -- by client, by agency and by creatives -- to the task of designing an online campaign. Jason, a pragmatic idealist, believes that all parties can in fact agree, get along, and succeed together. The key is up-front agreement on what the goals are, and on diciplined testing of executions against those goals.

This is advertising 101. It's always been the way to put together an effect campaign, on or off line. The difference with online work is that the focus group is the entire universe. Burby's book Actionable Web Analytics, written with Shane Atchison, was written a couple of years ago, but the wisdom is still current. It's worth checking out if you're trying to deepen your understanding of this dynamic trend.