People Lie, But Analytics Don’t

In today’s data-driven world, it is becoming harder and harder to lie about much of anything. Your GPS tracks your speed. Your website tracks your clicks. Your wife tracks your texts. Lying is quickly becoming a thing of the past because analytics and data are doing a great job at keeping us all precisely honest.

While exposure and access to data, both business and personal, may be scary, it may also start giving us real answers about performance. Grey areas are quickly becoming more black and white. This, I believe, is a good thing.

The World of Advertising Is Changing

Take newspaper advertising, for instance. In years past, brands would buy an ad in the newspaper hoping to spark a radical result – a game changer, they’d call it. Then, three people would come into their bagel shop, buy a bagel and the owner would claim that it was a waste. “Three freaking bagels,” he would say. And then the ad would stop running.

Then, marketers and advertisers got smart. Insert buzzword: Impressions.

“Keep buying those ads. Consistency is king,” they’d say. And they weren’t wrong. They simply didn’t have the data to back it up – or, they had it and just didn’t know how to read it.

Today, the impression is becoming less valuable than the results. The definition of results is also changing in front of our eyes; soon, it won’t be about leads, it will be about applications, then deals.

The Truth Will Be Revealed

However, those shifts won’t create more pressure for agencies; rather, it will be the brands that feel it, especially since the insight will become more than the ad. It will be what the campaign is sending the buyer to. Ads, data and analytics won’t put lipstick on brands with holes in them. The leaky buckets will develop bigger leaks.

Only then will brands stop lying. “It’s the agency’s fault,” will change to, “We didn’t meet the expectations of our customer through operations.” Data will call out lying operations folks who blamed marketing.

This is already happening. The shift can be seen deep within Google Analytics and cross-domain tracking – and even reviews and data. Analytics are shortening noses all over the world, forcing truth to be king, not lies that buy time.

But, there is still a great insight in this process: What you ultimately do with this data. Data is data – but it will only ever be as good as what you do with it.