Читать книгу Gamification Marketing For Dummies - Zarrar Chishti - Страница 58

It’s easy to get carried away with metrics without really understanding what they mean in context. In other words, it’s just as important to analyze your data as it is to collect it.

I, too, am guilty of becoming obsessed with vanity metrics (any social media metrics that make your company’s presence look good but do very little in terms of engagement), such as follower counts and likes. The fact is, the data from vanity metrics can’t help you measure your company’s past and current performance in a way that allows you to create a strategy for your gamification marketing campaign. These data points can look impressive when you’re looking at them on a report. But, unfortunately, they may mean very little without some context.

Your company having thousands of followers will mean very little if those same followers aren’t translating into sales. Similarly, it’s pointless posting interesting news and content if the majority of your followers fail to engage with it.

Not all is lost, though. There must be a reason for your company to have gained all these followers. The cause may have been a popular hashtag you used or created in the past or it may have been a popular post or article. By identifying the reasons for the followers you have, you can use the same tactics in your marketing campaign’s launch strategy.

Vanity metrics are ultimately useless because they’re too easy to measure and contain no context. This can mean they’re often misleading and, more important, don’t really help your gamification marketing campaign in any meaningful way. They look impressive, but sadly, they’re devoid of substance.

Sure, go ahead and take pride in your earned metrics. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with sharing this data to demonstrate how well your company is doing online. But just know that the data can’t be used as evidence for your campaign. Best to leave it for website headlines and press releases.

Arguably any of your social media data can be a vanity metric. The good news is: You can identify which metrics are meaningless. The central question to ask yourself when considering a metric is whether it will help your business achieve its goals. Here are three questions you can ask yourself to identify vanity metrics:

 Can you make meaningful decisions for your gamification marketing campaign using this metric? Dismiss the metric if your answer is “no.”Actionable metrics can help you make decisions for your campaign. This is because the data provides meaningful feedback and context for what your campaign should be doing and whether it has a chance of working.Smart data can also help you adjust your campaign strategies so that the campaign attracts a bigger audience. Any social media data you collect should help make your campaign’s launch better.

 Can you reproduce the results? Any social media data that was produced as a random occurrence will not be helpful to your campaign. When it comes to viral posts in social media, lightning rarely strikes twice unless you can identify a cause and effect within the data.Make sure the metrics have been reproduced more than once. If you can’t reproduce a statistically similar metric, then you can’t use it to improve your campaign. This means that although the metric looks great, the data and knowledge behind it won’t do anything to help your campaign.

 What caused the metrics to look so good? Did someone with a large following notice one of your company’s posts and repost it to his followers? If so, try reaching out to him over a private message and ask how he noticed your campaign — and be sure to express your gratitude, too.Was a third-party algorithm (that your company has no control over) responsible for the spike? Engage with the owners/developers of this algorithm to see if you can utilize it for future campaigns.Was seasonality a factor (where a particular month was responsible for the majority of the metric)? This will be an invaluable source of information when you come to analyze your campaign further using big data (see Chapter 11).Did someone in your company pay to increase the numbers of likes or even followers? If so, determine whether this spending was a good return on investment (ROI) for your campaign.