The Inherent Flaw Of Digital Analytics?

Why benchmarking is essential to fill the digital marketing gap

In theory, analytics can tell you anything you want to know about your last digital promotion - except whether or not it was successful... For example, analytics may tell you?

• Your conversion rate was 3%. Is that good?
• Engagement is down. Is it down across your competitive set or is it just you?
• Redemption rate exceeded targets by 10%. Was the bar set too low?

You won't get these insights from your digital marketing analytics because all they can give you are your numbers, which are meaningless unless you have something to compare them to. Benchmarking tools provide answers by plotting your data against the industry-specific averages for hundreds of metrics. You'll know what objective success looks like. You'll know if you achieved it. And you'll know how your promotion fared versus the competition.

Fill in the analytical gap

As more brand managers and agencies seek competitive benchmarks, they're seeing value in the context brought to their entire digital marketing strategy beyond promotions. Some customers use benchmarks in the planning stages of a campaign to set challenging yet realistic expectations. Others use benchmarks as an HR tool to evaluate their marketing managers. Most commonly though, agencies will utilize competitive benchmarks to demonstrate how successful their work was, where a brand may leverage benchmarks for compliance and budget planning.

But they all want their Qoints benchmark score because, like Eisenberg and Zuckerberg said, "we all want to know what our friends are up to."

[See Adobe Study Marketers recognize the importance of data, but aren't widely using it to make informed decisions]

Know where you stand

Develop a formal rating system based on competitive benchmarks! Indexing is the easiest and most objective way of measuring success. It's one number that will tell you everything you need to know about the rest of them. If you are running a digital campaign right now, get a better understanding of how your competition is performing; The definition of success and where you can improve will be a lot more obvious.

Thanks to Cory Rosenfield for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Cory is the co-founder and CEO of Qoints, a digital marketing intelligence (DMI) and competitive benchmarking tool for enterprise marketers. Previously, he held the role of Technical Director for multiple small-to-medium sized marketing agencies in Toronto as CSO of InfiniteSM, a social marketing consultancy and development house. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.