I saw this fascinating interview with Google’s ‘Captain of Moonshots’ (yes, I know!) about how Google ‘rewards failure’. The point is that if you don’t fail occasionally you haven’t aimed high enough – and that real failure is repeating the same mistake over and over. A good piece and an example of why Google is such an innovative company.
But it got me thinking of the dangers of simplistic interpretation of monitoring and evaluation data. We’re obsessed with evaluation here at Hat Trick, KPIs are set for everything we do, results monitored closely and tactics amended regularly dependent on the results achieved. In today’s digital world, there are myriad tools and techniques to track the effectiveness of your campaigns in real time, so there can be no excuses for not knowing what is and isn’t working.
But therein lies the danger. There can be a tendency to have a knee-jerk reaction to tactics that don’t work quickly – drop them. This can be a huge mistake. Quite often ‘fine tuning’ of the activity is what is really needed and a ‘failing’ tactic can become a big success.
Take blogging (for the dual purpose of reputation building and SEO) for example. A sustained blogging campaign requires significant investment in senior management time, so, if little engagement is being achieved and those SEO improvements aren’t being achieved it is a temptation to allocate your precious resources elsewhere. Particularly if other tactics are delivering results. But more productively you should see the issues as a challenge, not a failure. Have you got the subject matter right? Are you doing everything possible to optimise for search – both in the on page content and the functionality of your blogging platform? Are you using all your other channels to seed the blog? Are you proactively engaging with other bloggers? Could you make more use of guest bloggers? Upping your game could turn a so-called failure into a valuable marketing activity.
And then, are you sure you’re monitoring and evaluating the right things in the right way? Let’s say you’re an ecommerce business and a large amount of traffic is coming from Google search but virtually none from your social media channels. Invest in SEO and PPC and less on social right? Not necessarily. Have you devised an attribution model? What incentives are there in your social media content to make the leap to your website? Is website traffic the right parameter to measure for the effectiveness of your social media channels? Investing time in improving your performance in this area could be so much more valuable in the long term than giving up on it.
Monitoring & Evaluation should be your servant, not your master.
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