Can you spell "Digital Marketing" without "Measurement"? Apparently so...

New McKinsey research demonstrates lack of understanding around metrics. 

Ok, ok - so I know you really can spell "Digital Marketing" without "Measurement", sure, but the great conundrum remains: if digital marketing is reputedly the most measureable form of marketing, then why is it so hard to quantify? 

We've written about the challenges in quantifying digital marketing before here on BoostStrapping but a new McKinsey digital advertising survey of 340 senior marketing executives around the world shows that it may time some time before digital marketing can truly be quantifiable.  "The rapid growith of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital word has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it." 

Some key points:

• 91% of the survey respondents say that their companies are advertising online.
• Over half of those surveyed indicated that their companies will maintain this spending at current levels or even to increase it. 
• 55% of respondents are cutting expenditures on traditional media in order to increase funding for their online efforts.  

Some key "OMG" points:

• 43% of respondents don't measure impact of digital marketing. 
• 80% of respondents say that their companies use qualitatitve measure -  i.e. subjective judgements - or simply do what they did last year. 
• Under 50% of respondents use even the most basic of metrics - the click through rate.  
• Only 30% of respondents consider the offline impact of online marketing.  This is especially disconcerting since we've reported here on BoostStrapping before that  offline  sales are directly related to online touchpoints.

These points demonstrate that this great divide in spending versus results will come to a head in 2009.  These symptoms reflect a key root problem: no one knows what they're measuring or even why they measure.  This inconsistency makes the data irrelevant because its not meaningful. 

Our solution: The Marketing Scorecard. 

TO BE CONTINUED...