For many years I worked in an environment that would on many occasions justify the look and feel of something by simply defining it as ‘Shit Hot’. It had always troubled me that, although most of the work I was observing was without doubt beautifully crafted, its existence could never be commercially justified because no one could be bothered to think about measuring its effectiveness and adapting it based on the results.
But that was a few years ago and how things have changed since then. A business can no longer afford to spend on creative and digital services without understanding what return it is giving them. However, finding an agency that actively measures effectiveness presents a whole new challenge and one which needs approaching with some caution. For agencies that are being run as businesses and with a deep understanding of the purpose of on and offline marketing, measuring the effectiveness of the whole or part of an application is an everyday occurrence and critical to developing better digital applications for clients.
As an industry I would assume that we are all familiar with including analytics as part of a site / application build. But how many agencies sit with a client, look at the data and base significant site changes on it? I would suspect a good few do but the majority will just use the data to justify that the site they have crafted is successful, job done, happy client etc.
It is essential that an agency doesn’t just output the stats that show success – we proactively search for the stats that show failure and share them with the client because we know that by finding these points of failure we can improve and grow an applications success rapidly.
If you want to test your agency to see if they really are looking at website effectiveness ask them if they can tell you where the biggest points of failure are on your website.
Note this:
If you’re asking them in the first place it begs the question why they are not telling you already in a monthly / weekly report
If they respond with a set of figures that show yet again visits are up they don’t understand and really shouldn’t be analysing your stats
If they respond with a set of figures showing completed goals versus goal abandonment then they are on the right track
If they respond with a set of figures showing completed goals versus goal abandonment with exact points in the funnel the visitor abandoned then they are bang on the money.
It’s key to understand where your application fails rather than where it succeeds. By doing so you will be able to improve and adapt your application in ways that truly benefit the user and client, which will without doubt increase the effectiveness of your application. Measuring failure is a key part of measuring your marketing communications’ effectiveness. Only by understanding what is working and what isn’t can your agency truly deliver value and bottom line results.
