An Obsession with Advertising, Accountability, and Awesomeness

A guest post by Avinash Kaushik

I'm so incredibly impressed with the rapid evolution there's been in the advertising and marketing possibilities available to us. Offline, online, social—there are so many things to do and so little time (and budget!).

One of the absolute delights of online marketing (regardless of type) is the amount of accountability you can bring to your marketing budgets. For example, think about how challenging it is to know how many people looked at your ad in a magazine and took action. In contrast, think about how easy it is to measure the same thing for your digital display ads. How many potential customers were actively looking for cars, saw your ad on TV, and then went to your destination? You can measure this for your search ads. How often do prospects listen to your radio ads completely and then engage with you? You can measure this for your YouTube ads.

I could keep going. It's so exciting what we can measure, regardless of the online channels we use or the measurement tools to which we have access.

And yet, it's heartbreaking how little we bring all this awesomeness to bear upon our digital efforts. So much of our marketing is simply replicating our offline advertising online. And what's particularly heartbreaking to me, the author of two books on web analytics, is how we bring our low expectations of offline measurement to our online efforts.

So let's change this. Together.

UPDATE:

In case you were unable to attend the webinar on this topic last week, here is the recording of what was discussed. Look for more webinars in the coming months on topics such as campaign attribution, mobile metrics, and branding metrics, to name a few!

-Avinash

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew