When you buy food from a restaurant why don’t you pay by the ounce? That’s the way the restaurant bought most the ingredients that went into your meal. So why don’t you buy your food the same way? This is how restaurants make money, they add value by putting all the pieces together in a (hopefully) delicious meal.
Why do advertisers feel the need to measure their results against the way they bought the ingredients? I am of course talking about my favorite whipping post, the CPM. Just because you buy media based on CPM doesn’t mean you have to measure results based on CPM. The same goes for the world of search and the PPC. And why on earth PR people feel the need to adopt an ad equivalency model just boggles my mind.
I don’t blame advertisers for selling their ad inventory by CPM. They’re one ingredient to the full marketing meal. But it’s only one piece of the picture.
Whats worse is when I see marketers applying the same metric to social media. I have actually seen marketers take a social media disaster and call it success because of the amount of reach that their nightmare of a campaign achieved.
In fact any single metric is worthless!
We are beyond the point of showing metrics for social media. We can show you all kinds of metrics. The next step is to create a scorecard showing the net results of all the efforts.In that score card will be things like CPM, unique visitors, comments, shares, downloads, purchases and whatever else you’re measuring.
This is the difference between buying individual ingredients and buying a meal.
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Photo credit by Bill Ward’s Brickpile
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