Did Measurement Kill the Creativity Star? Let’s ask Jacques Warren.

Posted by Dan Ring on September 10, 2010

Question: what was the first video to appear on MTV? Answer: Video Killed the Radio Star (by The Buggles) And now on to my awkward transition…

Goodbye to summer and hello to fall…and hello to football…and hello to apple picking and foliage…and hello to back-to-school…and hello to this week’s Marketing Speakeasy guest, Jacques Warren. Jacques is an interactive marketing pioneer and a web analytics influencer who’s focused on many topics, currently among them: multichannel analytics, data integration, and mobile analytics. You can check out Jacques’ posts at Analytics Notes and Web Analytique & Optimisation.  He’s also published “Web Analytics,” which is currently the top selling book on the topic in French. Welcome Jacques.

Unica: Does measurement kill creativity?

Jacques Warren: There seems to be some misconception that measurement is antithetic to creativity. If we listen to proponents of that position, the analytical and creative minds live opposite to one another. It is as if measurement choked creativity, wanted to put it in a cage, preventing it to be free.

Many times I have been in a meeting with angry marketers, designers, or agency account managers because I was demonstrating that their ideas didn’t work. Didn’t work for the business that is. Meeting quantitative goals online, when you take the pain to define them, is something very hard to do; amazingly, people tend not to behave the way we would like them to!

To me, people who think measurement kills creativity simply have problems handling accountability. Businesses constantly face problems, and finding solutions to those problems is when creativity is at its most useful. Creativity performs best under pressure, and it’s measurement’s role to apply it.

One more point: analysts too should be creative in their work. How? By asking ever better questions, by going deeper into the data, by learning how to follow new paths that will bring more valuable insights. That type of creativity in measurement is what separates mere reporting bores from authentic analysts.

Unica: What are some of the biggest blind spots that web analysts have when it comes to measuring their website’s profitability?

Jacques: For Web Analytics to work, they have got to be relevant, very much so. In order to accomplish that, I believe it is extremely important for analysts to understand in detail the business they are in; at least the online part of it.

A major blind spot, and I am not trying to be sarcastic, is an actual concern with profitability. In my eight years of Web Analytics consulting, not once have I met a Web Manager who was evaluated on how the Web investments contributed to the company’s overall profitability. Sales, or any other type of conversion, yes, but profitability, no. I believe that would change the whole optimization dynamics if they were. Maybe this is because the Web still has to prove it can contribute to the top line at many companies.

Besides this crucial focus on profitability, most Web analysts don’t naturally have access to a large part of the equation: costs. This is where they could benefit a lot from making friends with their colleagues at accounting or finance. Those people know about measuring a business!

Unica: What are some of the biggest mistakes web analysts make when picking their metrics to report on?

Jacques: If I take the question strictly, I would reply that Web analysts are not the ones supposed to “pick the metrics”! Metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), what have you, are at heart a common language, i.e. an agreed upon narrative that will tell you how well the business is doing. The metrics choice can thus not be a solitary process, but must involve everyone touched by the online business.

So, this being said, a deep understanding of the company’s core business and goals is essential, as I said above. A typical problem is to see as KPIs metrics that are in fact too operational, too close to a description of what visitors do on the site, and not enough of how the business is influenced by those actions. Think “Conversion Rate” versus “Web Customer Life Time Value,” where the latter informs us way better about the current and future health of the business.

Finally, it is very easy to spend most of our mental energy on tools (selection, configuration, maintenance, troubleshooting, etc), and not enough thinking about how to really improve the business.

Ask not what you can do for your tools – ask what your tools can do for you.