Claude Hopkins, pretty much the inventor of modern advertising, was a developer of and major exponent of testing and measuring. He wrote a whole book on the subject, “Scientific Advertising”, first published in 1923.
Sensible, right? Not very controversial, right?
Yet in 1999, Sergio Zyman (former head of Marketing at Coca-Cola) titles a book “The End of Marketing as We Know It” which is in considerable part about testing and measuring.
Justifying marketing as producing results is STILL a big topic of discussion in industry rags like “Ad Age.”
If you are purchasing marketing realize you may have a job on your hands trying to determine how to, and then actually succeeding in collecting, the numbers necessary to measure the results.
It’s not a trivial exercise. Let’s take Internet Marketing. Everyone knows “search engine rankings.” You want to be on page one on Google searches.
Yet that is only one of about eight different factors that affect the bottom line, which is that your Internet Marketing should generate qualified prospects or (for online stores) sales.
Just to name a couple of really obvious ones, let’s say you DO get on page one on a Google search for certain search terms.
Are they the most important terms, in terms of volume of searches and relevance to what you are selling?
And what happens if they DO go to your website. Does it blow them away or blow them off?
So think about it. You have to have statistics that can be accurately collected and in a timely enough fashion to be useful. And they have to actually measure what you are trying to accomplish.
It isn’t surprising if this takes quite some work. After all, even in the last few years, better statistics for baseball players were developed (by an amateur!) than those that had been used for the last 100 years.
But it is worthwhile.
Hopkins asserts that IF you test and measure, success in advertising is virtually guaranteed.
Perhaps he exaggerates. But not by much.