Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

I was reading a story today written by Marcus Chan and published by Marketing Interactive that proported Digital Marketing was lacking suitable ROI metrics. Given SinoTech Group is a developer and provider of Web Analytics/Buzz Monitoring technology I was generally interested in this perspective and analysis. Marcus’s story was a commentary based on a study called, “The Digital Horizon: A Chasm between Expectation & Execution” undertaken by Eyeblaster and TNS.

The study on digital marketing has revealed that 44% of marketers blame a lack of suitable metrics to measure impact and ROI as a barrier to cross channel adoption in campaigns. Wow… that was certainly a significant population of Marketers but I wanted to drill into the study further and really understand the issues and rational for this. I downloaded the study (after registering for the download I started fearing this maybe nothing more than a lead gen exercise rather than a credible whitepaper done with rigor and good research discipline).

The study looked at 400 senior marketers across three regions; North America, EMEA, and APAC. Unfortunately, the paper did not include the original interview questions or methodology, so it makes it dificult to provide an alternative analysis of the responses.

The report said there was a gap between the appreciation of cross channel campaigns and true cross channel integration as nearly 67% of respondents cite that they already are running cross channel campaigns – yet only 12% are actually integrating cross channel performance data.  Other barriers to cross channel adoption cited by marketers are a lack of case studies to prove cross channel effectiveness (37%), and a lack of technology (34%).

I am afraid that the paper seemed more self serving in the promotion of the notion “better analytics leads to more cross channel adoption”. I am an eyeblaster fan but was disappointed at the level of detail provided. Maybe a great marketing doc and lead generator … but as a credible piece of research… it was poorly lacking.

I am very happy to get other feedback and ideas on this paper. Let me know if you agree or not.