It’s all digital first.
To really understand and quantify the impact that digital communication has had on human behaviour, you don’t need to rely on anecdotal observation from the public transport network. The really smart practitioner can use sophisticated tools to monitor the audience’s activities precisely and in detail. Of course the trick is teasing useable and relevant insights out of all that data and detail. Key to understanding all the data is to screen for quality rather than just quantity. Not every “hit” is a good hit. Not all site visits are created equal. Not every “like” or “share” offers a commercial opportunity. At it’s crudest level, not every click-through is even deliberate.
Recent innovations have revolutionised measurement and analytics. Heat-mapping allows you to understand exactly where users are spending most time on your homepage; which pieces of content are most likely to make them stay engaged – and which are most likely to provoke their swift departure. Here at Delineo, we’ve developed a sophisticated dashboard that tracks and aggregates all the key social metrics to provide clients with a Zest score, enabling them to quickly see how effective their social media campaigns are. With the latest sophisticated measurement tools we can sift real meaning from the numbers. And at the end of 2015 we became part of Google’s invitation-only DoubleClick service, an attribution tool that enables you to track the ten previous online steps taken by visitors to your website.
So it’s measurability, that unique capacity for generating data that produces real insights in real time, that ultimately sets the digital world apart. It offers a compelling retort to John Wannamaker’s famous observation on advertising spend, allowing you to see for the first time, which half of your budget is wasted. It creates a unique opportunity for communications specialists and businesses that really want to understand how they engage with their audience. And it makes the most compelling case for a change in commercial behaviour that matches – or perhaps I should say ‘tracks’ – the shift that we’ve already seen in human behaviour: A shift to ‘digital first’.