GREED – lots of data no intelligence

You can have too much of a good thing. It has often been commented that online wins over offline because it offers real time feedback of people’s behaviour. This is true, but what is provided is something like this

Page views 10,000; Unique visitors 3000; click through rates 10%; bounce rates 3%; 55% of search engine traffic from Google; Top ten search terms are…

What does that actually tell us? The answer is very little – it gives no real understanding of who is visiting a site and what they are doing.

The reason so many businesses accept this quality of reporting (and so many agencies provide it to clients) is simple. With the sophistication of analytics software now available in the market place (Google Analytics, HBX, Omniture, etc) production of data is cheap but intelligence is expensive.

For this reason businesses and agencies are often greedy for data and do not invest the time and effort to turn data into intelligence. Without this investment they try to substitute volumes of data for insight – the intelligence must be in there somewhere so no-one can complain they never saw it.

Data will not help when you evolve your online strategy. Instead any changes you make will be a gamble that will be based on a hunch or the HIPPO effect (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion) described by Avinash Kaushik.

In order for the cycle of measure and evolve to work effectively your digital marketing strategy should be driven not by the greed for more data but by intelligent analysis making clear recommendations. In. Plain. English.