Everyone has their individual reasons as to why they measure their marketing efforts. The way I see it, we all fall into four categories: Justification of Budgets, Evaluation of Tools and Tactics, Insight into Customer Behavior, and Predicting and Projecting Results. Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we need to satisfy the most basic reason before we can move up to the more complex reason, and no matter how high you have progressed, the levels below are still extremely important. I like to call it the Hierarchy of Analytical Needs.

Here is a quick look at each of the levels.

Justification of Budgets
The lowest level of Hierarchy of Analytical Needs can best be explained with the following scenario: The CFO of your company walks into your office to discuss the need for budget cuts.
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Marketers and consumers are pretty familiar with the term “Buyer’s Remorse.”  You know how it goes…You’re in the store and see the perfect kitchen utensil. It promises to cut prep time in half! You must have it. After making the purchase, you rush home to give it a try. It ends up not doing exactly what you thought it would and a feeling of disappointment overwhelms you. This experience happens to all of us more times than we would like to admit and in some situations it causes a negative feeling towards the company or person who convinced you to make the purchase.

Very similar situations happen online all the time. I like to call it Clicker’s Remorse. Just imagine spending hours on Google, publication sites, and online directories looking for a solution to a problem. Finally, you find it! An attention grabbing banner ad promises to give the answer you are looking for.
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Excuse me; I need you to put down the analytics report. 
Yes, please put it down. 
Why?
Because it is time to stop reading the reports and take action.

I see a common trend in analytics. Everyone is jumping on the analytics bandwagon (which is a great!), but some are slow to take action based on the data being collected and reported. 

The purpose of analytics isn’t to create more reports for everyone to read.  We do it so we can learn and continuously improve. Jason Burby’s comment in his Clickz column really resonated with me. He said, “If you aren't taking action on the data, you're wasting money on the analytics tools and resources -- your ROI is zero!” He is right.

So, why aren’t more people taking action? I believe people hesitate because they don’t have complete faith in the numbers.
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Before coming to Godfrey, I spent four years of my business life working in fulfillment and distribution.  In that industry, time is money.  We constantly looked for ways to improve our processes in order to increase productivity and cut costs.  Sometimes the smallest changes resulted in huge improvements.

Marketing could learn a thing or two from the distribution industry.  Okay, we may not be shipping packages out the door, but we are shipping marketing messages. We need to continually look for ways to improve our message and the tactics we use to support it.

Thanks to the internet, we can easily receive metrics about the success of our marketing efforts.  If the metrics tell us an online ad isn’t performing well, we have a chance to rework it and improve the results.  Maybe the call to action wasn’t strong enough or the message of the ad wasn’t clear.  Possibly the image or animation used made viewers
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Flash back to middle school when your English teacher asked you the definition of the word autonomy and you had no clue.  The teacher gave you the word within a sentence and asked you to use the context clues to help figure out the definition.  “I’m going to give you full autonomy on the project, so you can do what you want.”

Ah yes, context clues.  I found myself thinking about context clues recently while looking through pages and pages of marketing metrics.  Metrics give us great insight, but when we don’t understand the story around the numbers, metrics can actually hurt us. 

Metrics tell us a story about what is going on with our website; online and offline advertisements, customer behavior, and so on.  To really understand what these numbers are saying, it is important to read the entire story.  I’ve seen people get obsessed with one or two metrics and completely ignore everything else that
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