While the full impact on paid social still lingers in the air, marketers everywhere are scrambling to tweak their setups to still be able to track just a tiny bit of what they used to.
All of sudden, marketers will be in the dark over the effectiveness of their social media marketing. No more full attribution down to the single ad creative that pushed people over the line and delivered the purchase.
But did we ever really know what drove that purchase?
No, we didn’t. But we thought we knew, and all the data at hand made us more confident that we were right.
Psychology professor, Paul Slovic, at the University of Oregon, made some experiments back in the seventies that show what’s wrong with paid social today. And almost all digital advertising for that matter.
What he taught us quite simply is that more data doesn’t mean better data. More data doesn’t say anything about the quality of the data. But that’s not the interesting part. What he found was that more data leads to more confidence. And that’s a much bigger issue.
We sometimes tend to think we know and understand everything, because so much can be measured. But not everything that can be measured matters.
The biggest thing impacting the profitability of your ads is your market share.
The best way to increase your market share is to outspend your competition
The best way to spend that money is to reach as many people as possible in your category with great creatives.
And I don’t mean a narrow definition of only millennials and Gen Z, that’s ALL the people in the category.
Following these rules is the best thing you can do for the effectiveness of your advertising.
Of course, not everyone can outspend the competition. But if we start focusing more on creative execution and high category reach, we’ve already gotten far.
And it can do wonders for you. Not just you, dear CMO, also you, dear growth hacker.
It’s the best way to build your brand.
And a strong brand is the best way to generate long-term sales.
A strong brand is the best way to increase your conversion rate
A strong brand is the best way to decrease your cost per lead.
A strong brand is the best way to lower your CPM.
It is my hope that social media marketing in the post iOS14 era will return to the deeds of good advertising and start measuring changes in brand, attention, and impact instead of the current short-term attribution focus that’s clouding our vision of what matters most.
Will it help us understand how many sales a specific ad generated? No.
Will we ever know with certainty everything that works well and everything that doesn’t? No.
But we never knew this. It was an illusion. False confidence. We’ve been taught that we can measure these things with absolute certainty, but we never really could.
I hope you’ll stay on for the journey and continue reading this blog, as we reveal more of our solution for the future of paid social measurement.
If you have any questions, or you would like a chat about how deepdivr can help you measure social media marketing do not hesitate to get in touch.
You can reach out to me here: kristoffer@deepdivr.io