Imagine, if just for a second, a world without digital analytics. A foreign concept, yes, but humor me. For one, you wouldn't get your stereotypical marketing jocks droning on for hours about how they drive engagement - true. But, besides that one crucial point, there would be little to gain in this hypothetical world. What once were personally catered and targeted ads might simply become obnoxious sleazy car salesmen reels, the beautiful and ergonomic website designs we've come to know and love would revert back to the archaic, hideous designs of the early 2000s, and overall, the internet would become a lot less efficient and a lot more redundant.
If you don't believe me, let's go down the rabbit hole and explore the horrors that await us in this analytic-less world:
Website Analytics:
Remember we did that blog a couple months ago, about website design, and I wrote up a wonderfully graphic essay of the horrors that come along with poor UX/UI? Well, sorry to break it to you, but in a world without website analytics, that's about the best you're gonna get. You would be lucky to even reach the domain, considering there would be no initiative to increase SEO (but that's a tale for another day). To keep it short and sweet, without data to back up web developer decisions, the poor web engineers would be constantly swinging in the dark, desperately trying to get something to stick. And even worse, because they can't conduct A/B testing, they wouldn't even know when something did work, so whatever good work they did would likely get replaced by newer, crappier work sooner than later.
To put this metaphorically, imagine you are baking a cake. You have never seen a tutorial on how to do this, you have never had a cake yourself, but one time you heard a friend talk about a cake so you want to make one too. You throw in whatever ingredients are in your fridge and pantry, you mix them together and throw it in the oven, and call it a day while you clean up. The cake you made may come out a burnt hunk of dijon mustard covered in olives and sprinkled with flour, but because you have no frame of reference, it seems like a mighty fine cake. And what's even worse, you can't even try the cake, so you'll never know just how badly your atrocity tastes. You'll just live on, happy as a clam, telling your friends about the awesome cake you baked over the weekend.
Social Media Analytics:
Well, this one might be a little harder to sell, because it would be a world without influencers constantly plugging Nord VPN and Audible every 5 minutes, but hear me out: social media analytics are HUGE. Social media is the equivalent of a scrying orb, constantly showing what the consumer is thinking or feeling. This might be about a celebrity, a trend, a brand or product - literally anything. No matter how guarded consumers have become, how wary they are of people using their social media metrics for marketing and advertising, the information derived from consumer generated content is absolutely invaluable to a brand or company. It creates a direct connection between them and their public, a space for the consumers to voice their opinions and thoughts that did not exist 20 years ago. It lets marketers observe trends, behaviors, opinions, and many, many other insightful aspects of consumer psychology that could only be found through primary research back in the day.
Why would this be so catastrophic to lose? Well - remember that Skittles commercial for the Superbowl a few years ago with David Schwimmer? Where no one ever found out what they were about? Every single ad on social media - and probably on TV - would look something like that. With no guidelines on how consumers felt about anything, and the expense of primary research and screening for advertising purposes, most companies and brands would default to weird, outlandish, attention-grabbing tactics to fight over the consumer's attention. Maybe it would be fun for some time, but ultimately, pretty awful.
Business Intelligence
This one is a little less marketing and a little more general business, but arguably one of the most important. While traditional financial indicators have always been the cornerstone of business analytics, those have long since been ascended with business intelligence services. This is a type of service that "transforms data into actionable intelligence, which can then be used to set your organization’s strategic and tactical business decisions without having to learn to write SQL queries or waiting for your IT department to run the reports for you." What this ripped definition from Google means is that analytics that were traditionally arduous to draw and find have suddenly became much more accessible and implementable thanks to programs like Looker or Tableau (our favorite).
This may seem negligible at first, but think about the impact that efficient data visualization has had on the world. It's the difference between looking at a chart pumped to the brim with numbers in 10pt font, and looking at a bar graph with pretty colors and lines running through it, showing you were to look and what to read. It seems insignificant, especially because of the tone of this piece, but it truly drove business decisions to a whole new level by making them more dynamic and more efficient than ever before.
So, there you have it. A world without any sort of analytics, held in balance between chaos and apathy by stupid David Schwimmer commercials. Okay, I may be exaggerating here, but a world without streamlined digital analytics would be a lot different than the one in which we find ourselves now. For one, a lot of us would be studying something else, simply because marketing wouldn't have the sway and power that it does in this day and age if it weren't for analytics. Not only that, but the consumer landscape would look totally different. We probably wouldn't have as many impulse purchases going on (whether that is a good or bad thing is up to you), and we would still be plagued by traditional, hyper-aggressive selling tactics like not too long ago, simply due to lack of understanding on the seller's part.
So, all in all, I would say Digital Analytics are pretty important, even if as consumers sometimes they can work against us. The important part to remember is this: as humans, we can only take so much David Schwimmer in our lives.
