In the glory days of ad men dominating Madison Avenue or Soho, they would celebrate their success of selling loads by necking Old-Fashioneds. But how much could they attribute to their ad. These days, we can put numbers against every headline and CTA.
I'm not a fan of numbers. I've always been a words girl. I drank in every morsel of my English class and sat head-in-hands throughout double maths, using my notebook to scrawl "I love Crispian Mills" instead of working out quadratic equations.
Landing my dream job as a writer (even if it is for someone else's benefit) meant I could indulge my love without needing to crunch any numbers.
Or so I thought.
Doing this job, I discovered a new love of numbers. I suddenly realised that it's not triangles I wanted to measure, but the impact of my words.
Que the MI, data analytics and insights teams.
As well as the standard conversion, traffic, clicks, shares, likes, followers, reach, etc. they have some pretty nifty tools to see how copy is performing.
Customer insight
Any company worth its onions will have conducted pretty through research into its market as a whole. They will have split their universe into segments and based on these findings and numbers decided which segment to chase.
Then you start building a picture of that segment using qualitative and quantitative research (or qual and quant, if you want to impress your marketing colleagues), from basic demographics to what they watch on TV and celebs they follow. This brings your target audience to life and helps you write age, income, cultural copy that resonates.
If you're really good, you can use these figures to hone your tone of voice and build realistic KPIs for content and social.
Online marketing analytics
This is related to platforms like Adobe Omniture - there are loads of others but this is the one I know the most. Using a query string appended to a CTA, it tracks where people go on the site. So you can see where your copy leads people. This isn't fail-safe, people have very short attention spans and it's not beyond the realms of possibility that they got distracted by something shiny, which is why they didn't end up where you wanted.
Heatmaps and eye-tracking
This is where it gets really clever. You can see what people look at first and how long they spend looking at it with clever technology, like heat-mapping and eye-tracking. Once you've got this, you know where to put your most important messages or you'll get verification that your copy is grabbing and holding a reader's attention.
Add to this the abundance of social media measuring, like impressions, mentions, links, shares, comments, etc. and the halo-effect of perhaps hitting the news with it, like Wendy's chicken nuggets man, everything you do can now be measured.
Don't be daunted by it, if it fails doesn't mean you'll be issued your P45 or taken off the preferred suppliers list, everyone knows these things are unpredictable and have lots of known and unknown factors that could skew results.
Use it as a tool to develop your craft. Then you won't need analytics, as you'll be too awesome for the maths geeks to even bother with.
