Measuring social: Even Q couldn't do it.

I'm sure you've seen this video from Coke Zero. It's brilliant.

Best example of a marketing viral I've seen in ages and I'm sure the Coke Zero social marketing team are giving themselves well deserved pats on the back.

This one's going to turn up in every "how to do social" slide deck that gets produced in the next 12 months. It's a rare example of a social campaign where nobody's going to argue with the value. Any marketer would be proud to have it on his CV.

But what if finance got awkward?

What if they insisted you'd never be allowed to pull a stunt like this again, unless you could prove it sold some bottles of Cola?

Well then you'd have a problem.

I've posted before that for a variety of reasons you've got virtually no chance of linking social media activity to sales. Actually, let's rephrase that. There are hundreds of ways to imply a link, but it's virtually impossible to prove a link, mostly because it's hard to get good audience data on who saw the viral and when they saw it, plus any positive effects it has on sales are likely to build up slowly, so looking for an immediate spike won't work.

We've all seen loads of 'how to measure the ROI of social' articles, which then spend five hundred words avoiding the question, but for once, I'd like to hit that question head on. First of all, for ROI in terms of additional sales, forget it. Even if you've got sophisticated econometric models in place you'll be lucky to pick up the effect. So here's what I'd do.

Your answer is going to need a £ figure in it, because you're talking to finance. Loads of Facebook shares and positive Twitter sentiment isn't going to cut it.

That YouTube video's got 3.8m views, so line up your social campaign vs. the alternatives. How much would it cost to run a TV advertising spot that achieved 3.8m impacts?

Actually, not that much. In the UK, take an average adult cost per thousand impacts on TV of £5 (ish) and you're looking at an equivalent value of... £19,000.

Damn, that's not very impressive. Probably not enough.

Say you can show that the audience for the YouTube vid is a bit better than a blanket "adults" target. That it's younger and would be harder to reach with TV. That wouldn't be difficult; if nothing else, you could show that YouTube users in general are younger and so your viral audience probably is too.

Now you might be able to justify a cost per thousand of around £50, rather than £5 because hitting younger viewers with TV spots is expensive. Your equivalent media value is £190,000. Better.

But hang on, that video is two minutes long, not the standard 30" TV spot. Four times the spot length, gets us to a value of £760,000.

That's more like it.

It's also more good evidence for why you'll struggle to measure a social media effect on sales. A global TV campaign for Coke with a budget of £760,000? Don't make me laugh. It's a drop in the ocean.

Once you've got a nice solid financial number, you can layer on some softer metrics, always referring back to  what it would have cost you to expose that audience in a different way. Did you gain Facebook followers? Great. They're valuable because you can talk to them again, rather than spending money somewhere else.

Shares on Twitter? Careful, those people are already in the YouTube plays number.

New followers on Twitter? Lovely, just like the Facebook ones, they have a value because now you can show them more advertising messages.

The last step you might want to try is that direct link to sales. You won't be able to prove it (I might have mentioned that) but you can imply it. If there's a general ROI to TV circulating in the business then you've just put social in the same space as that media, so you can potentially borrow it. How many sales would a TV campaign of that value have generated?

You might also be tempted to make the case that somehow Facebook advertising messages, or YouTube video views are 'better' than TV spots - that they're more engaging and with higher impact - but be very, very careful. You're doing this exercise for finance and they're almost certainly starting from the viewpoint that an ad is an ad, no matter where it's shown. Do you have rock solid evidence that it's better (ROI better) to talk to people on a social network than on TV? I don't. In fact I have the opposite, because you're more likely to be talking to existing customers.

Do what you can with the real financial metrics and accept that sometimes, your equivalent ROI number isn't going to look very impressive. After all, we've just proved that the best viral we've seen this year is probably worth less than running £1m worth of the same creative on TV.

Users don't want 'clever' dashboards

You're an analyst. Probably. That's why you're reading Wallpapering Fog.

If not an analyst, then at least inquisitive; if somebody shows you data then you want to dive a bit deeper and understand why the top-line numbers are doing what they're doing.

The more client dashboards we build, the more I'm discovering that while everybody always says they want to dive into the data, most people actually don't. If you give most marketing managers an interactive dashboard, they won't interact with it. They'll look at the screens in their default state, read what they can from them and then stop.

You can try to demonstrate how to interact with the data. When a marketer asks "why is my website bounce rate so high?", you can drill the number down, while they watch, and show which sources are sending the low quality traffic. They'll nod and thank you. Then next week, they'll ask exactly the same question again.

Unless you set up a screen which is specifically designed to answer the bouncing traffic question, without needing to be manipulated. A specific screen called "Sources of bouncing traffic". Then you'll have a happy client.

Who'll think of a different question, that you haven't already built a screen to answer.

I'm not being negative about interactive dashboards. I love interactive dashboards. Especially Tableau ones, but most of our clients aren't like me. If they were they'd be analysts, not clients.

If you're building dashboards for non-analysts, you may well find that they get a better reception if they're not interactive. Usually a marketer only has the same few questions on a Monday morning and if you can set up screens that answer them without being manipulated then you've got a happy marketer.

You could instead build an interactive screen, which with a few clicks will answer lots of questions, which would need multiple different static views to do the same job. Want a week-on-week and a year-on-year view? Just click the drill down button! What's the difference between branded and generic keyword searches? Click into the 'total searches' line and it will show you!

Except your marketer won't click the drill down button. They'll get frustrated that their dashboard isn't showing exactly what they want.

You can get annoyed about this. People don't want your clever interactive screens!

Or you can see the advantages.

We're doing quite a nice line in dashboards of Google Analytics data. The clients have a login to Google Analytics just like we do, but they don't use it because the GA website doesn't immediately show them exactly the stats, for exactly the date breakdown that they need, on one screen. With Tableau and Python to hit the Google Analytics API, it's very easy to set that up and automatically refresh it.

Now your client has a dashboard that they can't do without, that shows them exactly what they want at 9am on a Monday and you know what else? You don't even have to bill them for a server login because they want static views, so PDFs in their email are actually better than a login to an interactive system.

Not for everybody though, and those logins are still important. You can give analysts (or analytically minded people) on the client side some server logins, but I guarantee the Marketing Director doesn't want one. They might say they want one, but they won't use it, which is where we started. If they needed your dashboard login then they'd already be using Google Analytics.

A lot of dashboard software (and certainly Tableau) is really fantastic at two jobs. One, is making data interactive and easy to interrogate and analysts love that. The other is making refreshes of static screens really easy. Think hard when you're designing, because for a lot of people, those static screens are better.

Static screens may also be much harder to get right, even though building them feels a lot less clever. When you can't ask the user to click through to what they want, you have to know what they want before they arrive at your dashboard.

You have to really understand the client and their business. That's the really clever bit.

A clash of broadcasting worlds

Did you watch Felix Baumgartner's record breaking jump yesterday? It was amazing.

Watching live on the Red Bull branded wesite at www.redbullstratos.com, I thought we could be seeing a new era in live broadcasting. After all, if you own the content, then why get somebody else to broadcast it for you? Run your own station, for as long as you need it, on the web.

Why would Neil Armstrong's moon landing be broadcast on TV in an era of live streaming?

There is a very good reason.

Red Bull's stream (via YouTube) attracted an audience of eight million. That would be very impressive if it was a UK audience, but it isn't. It's a global audience.

Eight million globally is, frankly, a bit crap. It's a YouTube record, but that's not the point. ITV were showing an hour long Coronation Street special at the same time as Felix was hoping he'd packed his 'chute properly and that did 6.25m, just in the UK.

So why do you want a regular TV broadcaster for your content? Simple. Audience reach. It's the same reason advertisers want TV ads, even if they've truly bought into social media.

I'm assuming one of two things happened with Red Bull Stratos. Either Google bunged Red Bull some fairly serious cash for the exclusive rights to Live stream via YouTube, or regular broadcasters just weren't interested, because they couldn't be given a predictable prime-time slot when the jump would take place. "Sometime in the next week if the weather's ok" doesn't really work for an ITV scheduler.

In one (fabulous) event, we've got the best and worst of new and old media. Only old media could have got that footage in front of its true potential audience. But TV is too inflexible to make the scheduling work for an event as unpredictable as the Stratos project.

In the UK at least, it's a shame we didn't have a dedicated digital TV channel that could be activated on short notice and then trailed on a major network. Press the red button to watch a nutter jump from space. The technology is there and it worked really well during the olympics. For a moon landing type event (Mars landing?) in 2012, I'm betting that's what would happen.

Unfortunately, the broadcaster with that capability is the BBC. With Red Bull logos everywhere? Never going to happen.

We're not quite living in the future yet. If you missed the footage yesterday because you didn't have one eye on Twitter, then here's the Austrian with the big cahones in all his high altitude parachutey glory. Enjoy.

Nobody needs hourly reports. I now understand why they want them.

We build a lot of business dashboards at MediaCom, to track advertising performance, what your competitors are up to, your latest sales figures, that sort of thing.

I'm a strong believer in the fact that nobody needs to see those kinds of figures daily, or even more frequently than that. You can't learn very much when the frequency of your reports is that high. There's a good chance you'll focus on a misleading figure that's not part of a general trend and the little that you can learn, you can't react to. If one of your products is flying out the door, great! What are you going to do about that this afternoon?

Other than feel really good about it.

Which is what I discovered this week.

I set up my first ad campaign this week, for an online shop selling paragliding t-shirts, mugs and gifts (pump those SEO terms...) and I've instantly become obsessed with the traffic stats. Now that there's money at stake, it's even worse than monitoring Google Analytics for this blog.

So I get it. I want daily reporting too. If we can automate it, you can have it (because whatever the benefits, manual daily reporting is still a bloody silly idea.)

You still can't do anything useful with it. You're still going to need weekly and monthly summaries to understand what's actually going on. But very frequent reports are a huge motivator - they remind you that what you're doing is actually out there, in the world, and people are buying it. And that's important.

I didn't understand that, until in a very small way, I turned into an advertiser. It's been a great reminder that before you argue with what a client wants, you should walk in their shoes.

Planning a Big Data holiday

Friday analogy time. Bear with me...

Imagine you're planning a holiday. Or rather, you're deliberately not planning a holiday. You know you want a break from work but you're not sure where you'd like to go, or what you'd like to do.

Imagine also, that you're a marketer who's got very over-excited about the concept of Big Data.

So here's what you do.

You buy some really big suitcases and pack all the clothes you own into them. After all you don't know if you're going to the beach or the Arctic yet, so you'd better pack everything from Speedos to ski gear.

Will there be accommodation when you get there? We don't know yet. Best put in a tent. Or two, one for summer and one for winter.

And off to the airport, to investigate flights!

In the airport, you realise you also need lots of toiletries and medical supplies for your trip and another suitcase to store them in. You buy most of the stock in Boots and store it in your new suitcase because you still don't know where you're going or what you might need. The mosquito repellent bottle leaks everywhere and Deet is nasty, smelly stuff so you have to buy lots of things twice.

You pick a flight and head off on holiday. The flight was expensive, because you bought the ticket at the airport, rather than in advance. You'll be paying off your excess baggage fees for the next ten years.

Your hotel at the other end is expensive too because you didn't arrange a cheap deal before you left.

Finally, despite your hotel room being stuffed full of suitcases that you didn't need to bring and your bank balance having taken a hammering, you have a really fantastic holiday. A job well done.

You've probably guessed where I'm going with this one, but (not) planning a holiday like that, is pretty much the approach we're taking when we say "let's assemble loads of data and wonderful things will happen."

They might. If you don't run out of money along the way.

But if you decide where you want to go first and then build what you need to get there, you'll build something faster, better, more useful and for a hell of a lot less money.

Big Data is not an end in itself, it's a means to an end. If you don't know where you're going yet, then stop, work that out, and then go looking for what you'll need to get there.

Does the marketing industry bury bad news?

This article turned up on Adage last week. It's a proper, well thought out, scientific piece of marketing research, with an extremely important conclusion.

So why haven't you seen it anywhere?

Well, unfortunately, it strongly suggests that most of the clicks we see on display advertising may be just noise. Accidents. Slips of the mouse. There aren't that many clicks you see - click rates on display ads are around 0.02% to 0.04% - and with a click rate that low, a lot of them could easily be flukes.

Read the Adage article. It's important.

You didn't read it, did you?

OK, quick summary. The authors ran blank display ads and got click through rates on them that were significantly better than industry benchmarks for branded display ads that don't carry a call to action.

Stop trying to think up reasons why that might be able to happen, which wouldn't cast any doubt on the effectiveness of many display campaigns (which is exactly what most commenters on the Adage article immediately did). The authors even covered the possibility that people might click a blank space out of curiosity, by asking those who clicked, why they clicked. Like I said, it's a proper, well thought out, scientific study.

Adage ran the story, which is great. Adage do like a bit of controversy. As far as I can tell, the industry has buried it. If it had definitively proved that display ads made significant numbers of people go and search for products on Google, you can bet your life you'd have heard about it - it would be all over Twitter. Or if it had proved that Facebook advertising had a massive ROI? We've all seen those studies (and they're not very scientific...)

If we're going to take marketing measurement seriously, we need to accept that sometimes ads will be shown not to work as hard as we hoped and the studies that return those results shouldn't be buried without a trace. The authors here are also very careful not to be entirely negative. They're most interested in the fact that we use clicks to tune display placements, but those clicks look largely random. They don't try to make the step to any ROI implications.

Going back to item #3 on last week's top ten, we're going to see this result again. Third time around, maybe the industry might decide it can't just be ignored.

(Adage article originally found via @AdContrarian)

Ten rules of marketing analysis

It's been a while since we had a top ten on Wallpapering Fog. Number one on this list came up (again) today, so let's have Wallpapering Fog's top ten rules of marketing analysis.

1. If you think you've discovered a radical, unexpected, new result that nobody's ever noticed before, your data is wrong.
   
   
2. More complicated analysis can help you measure your marketing much more accurately. But if simple analysis can't find any impact at all from a marketing campaign, then there probably wasn't one.
   
   
3. Nobody ever abandons a campaign that doesn't work, the first time that you prove it doesn't work. Three is the magic number.
   
   
4. ROI means return on investment and it's measured in money. Not clicks, likes, web traffic or re-tweets.
   
   
5. If you're not selling ice-cream, then the weather isn't responsible for your 50% year on year sales decline. Even Noah needed food and clothes.
   
   
6. Never trust a piece of research that was funded by a media owner.
   
   
7. Ten thousand respondents is plenty. A million is very rarely necessary - it just takes much longer to open the spreadsheet. You only need a spoonful of soup to know what the whole bowl tastes like.
   
   
8. That means the BARB TV ratings panel is fine. Leave it alone, online people.
   
   
9. When forecasting next year's sales, assume that your new adverts aren't any better than your old adverts. I'm sorry if that's depressing, but it's almost always true.
   
   
10. The world is never changing so fast that you can't learn something from the past couple of years. People's basic motivations haven't changed since the dark ages.