 So, hello everybody and welcome to my talk, which is called Stop Measuring the Wrong Marketing Outcomes. Taco already introduced me, my name is Marike van Racht. And if you know me, you know me from Yoast, because that's where I was. I can say, since June, I can say that I'm the co-founder. I got permission. I'm the co-founder of Yoast, and I used to be the CEO, but I left Yoast. I'm totally out of the Yoast business. I still miss my colleagues, and we started something new. And with Emilia, we're investing in startups, and that can be WordPress startups. But we also have other startups in which we invest. They all have an online component, though, because that's just where our expertise is. That's what we know most about. And so, next to investing money, we also help these companies grow. And what I usually do is help them with their marketing efforts. Before I started at Yoast, before I started in the WordPress world, I studied communication sciences, amongst others, because I also studied sociologists. And I have a PhD in social sciences. And while doing my PhD, I did a lot of data research. I am a bit of a data nerd, actually. I love statistical analysis. I love big data sets. I love doing queries on those. I actually taught statistics and research methodology at the university for a while. So when I first entered that WordPress space and was allowed to do things as an internet marketer, I was amazed by the amount of data there is in the internet world. I was amazed about the possibilities of conversion tracking, of A-B testing. And I thought that I was going to be the master at that, because I had the background. This was going to be my thing. But then I was diving into Google Analytics, and I got frustrated a lot. I got mad a lot, because the things I wanted to measure were not in the data set. And then I ended up still looking at data. It's not that I don't do data. But I think about half of all the marketing efforts I did at Yoast were not particularly data-driven. And so sometimes somebody came up to me and said, Marike, you're doing things based on feelings. And that's not true. But I do understand that comment, because in a world where everything is about data, I decided to do differently. And in this talk, I'm going to tell you why. So we're going to start with looking at how do audiences, how do people actually get influenced by the media or by marketing? And what would happen if we would only keep focusing on data? And then I have to pose an alternative, right? So we'll also talk about what we should do instead. Let's start with some theory. How do the media affect people? Well, researchers have been researching this for about 100 years, because 100 years ago radio emerged, and newspapers, and magazines. And you had movies, television didn't become big back then. And what people thought was that the media directly would influence people immediately. And they called that the hyperdermatoneedle theory, as though the media would inject media messages in someone's vein, and you would immediately do what that message would tell you. And they would think that people were very passive, and just thinking, this is it, and that everybody would have the same effect. This sounds weird to us now, but they actually had a lot of evidence pointing towards that direction. Maybe you know this story, it's about play on the radio, so it was like a theater thing on the radio, and it was about our planet being invaded by aliens from Mars. And so people in the 1930s, a group of people, thought that there was actually an invasion, and they panicked. And they ran in the streets, and they got the news. These kinds of anecdotes were the reasons why communication scientists back then thought that the media had a very large influence. Also, the 1930s, that was the emergence of the Nazi propaganda, mainly in Germany, which had large effect on the entire history. So this is what we thought, what we have learned since the 1940s. We now know that effects of media messages are hardly ever direct. You don't go out and buy a new type of laundry detergent just because you saw a television ad. If you see rich from the bolt in the beautiful drink a can of Diet Coke, you don't feel the urge to immediately buy one yourself. So there's something else that's doing things. Social ties, the networks you have with other people, are super important. Your friends, your family, what they say is really important. If your mother likes a certain type of laundry detergent and you see that ad, that could mean that you buy that. Unless you have a bit of a weird relationship with your mother, it could well be that you will not buy that type of brand. We also know that audiences are very diverse, so not everybody reacts to a media message in the same way. Not everybody will react to your marketing campaign in the same way. And audiences are very active. You choose to which talk you're going to go. You choose which newspapers you read. You choose which queries you type into Google. But people are active. So, super nice anecdote, Marike, you're thinking now. Very, very nice. But why is this important for online marketing research in this day and age? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Because in the way we measure our marketing campaigns, we assume direct effect because we measure last clicks. We don't take into account any of the social ties or networks. And we certainly don't think of our audience as being very diverse and that media messages are received by people in a different way. We measure, mostly measure, last click attribution. So, as I stated at the beginning of this talk, when I started working as a marketeer, I was so excited because it seemed to me that this was going to be so much easier. I have been doing measuring effects of television advertisements. Think about that. Do you know how hard that is? And then I got all these data and I was like, this is going to be easy. And I think what happened is because there is so much data, we forgot that there are so many things you can't measure. And that perhaps the things you can't measure are even more important than the things you can measure. But because of the sheer amount of data we've collected, something which is called evidence-based marketing appeared. So every marketeer wanted to have data that provided them to say, well, this is what we're going to do because the data says this is what we should do this. So we're going to do this. You're stupid. You're doing things based on feelings. But research has shown that on average people have seven encounters with a brand before ever buying it. So imagine you're selling WordPress plugins or you have an agency and you do marketing. This is Person A. And Person A watches a YouTube video of someone in which your brand is named for the first time in September somewhere. And then a few months later it's targeted by one of your Instagram ads. Two ways of hearing about your brand. And then over Christmas he talks to his brother-in-law and he's a fan of your product. Now, and then time goes by and he runs into problems. He wants a new website. He needs an agency. He's going to Google something and ends up on a landing page on your website. And then subscribes to your newsletter. I think that's the first thing you can measure. And then some once later he reads a newsletter and thinks, huh, this is interesting. But before I'm going to buy, I'm going to call back that person I spoke with over Christmas. But he wasn't at home. So it took another month and then he talked to that person and then later on he bought your product. There are a lot of things that lead to convincing people that they should buy your product or service. But they're not measured by the data we collect. And I call that the unmeasurable. The effects of all your marketing efforts you are not able to measure with common metrics. And there's a lot of those. Newsletters, unopened newsletters will have an effect. If the subject line of my favorite clothing brand, Pink Suit, says sale, I usually don't open emails or just not my thing. But if the subject line says so, I'm influenced and I'll probably go to their website to buy something. It's unmeasurable, but it's still in effect. Just scrolling through your Instagram page, encountering brands, seeing those brand names on top of the stories, just the brand name gets you influenced, gets you, does something. You can't measure that though. If you Google something, but you don't end up on the landing page on the website because the answer is given in the Google search engine result pages. You are influenced, but you can't measure that. Talking to people. I'm not on TikTok. I know so much about TikTok. I have a 13-year-old daughter. She shows me TikTok. And if you think that won't influence me, I have a pair of heedless curls in my closet. They don't work. That's say otherwise. So I'm very influenced by things my daughter sees on TikTok. But you can't measure that. WordCamps, having a booth at a WordCamp, speaking on station on WordCamp, talking about your product in the hallway track of a WordCamp. It will probably not lead to a sale. But hey, direct effects don't exist, but it will influence people. It will be very hard to measure though. What's unmeasurable does not mean that it's not valuable. On the contrary, we know that media effects are not direct. We know that all of these things matter. But the things we can't measure are probably even more important than the things we could do. But here's the thing. Without data, it's very hard to convince people. It's very hard to get your manager to get the budget for a certain campaign if you can't show the return of an old investment. Showing what a Google ad will get you in terms of sales is pretty simple. If the return on investment is positive, you go ahead and do that. But trying to get budget for a content marketing campaign can be much harder. How do you convince them? How do you know for sure that the budget you have to have to write all those beautiful articles will end up having you those sales? It's just not as clear. But we are fooling ourselves here. Because a Google ad campaign means that you have to pay and pay and pay up until you do that ad, and perhaps it gets even more expensive if you never know with Google, while a content marketing campaign could be much more sustainable. You just can't measure it. And I think we've been fooling ourselves and also perhaps been a bit lazy because we've been spoiled by the sheer amount of data we have. So I want to give you an example on how the television ad market emerged because they also had a period in time in which nobody believed that television ads would have any effect. Perhaps now they won't because nobody watches television anymore. But back in the 1980s, there was this big brand of laundry detergent. I love laundry detergent, but it was laundry detergent brand. And they did a lot of television ads. But the CEO of the company said, well, you can't measure the effect. It's totally useless. It's very, very expensive, especially around the Super Bowl. We should not do these kinds of ads anymore. And they stopped. And what happened was nothing at first. Because nobody is not going to buy that type of laundry detergent because they did not see a television ad. It doesn't work like that. But what did happen after a year was a significant drop in sales. And this has been measured because people are making these mistakes over and over again. If you stop doing it, then the effect is measurable. So if we now have a few of you who say, OK, I will stop all my unmeasurable branding. Then after a year, perhaps a little bit more, we can measure the effect. And what we see in studies is it's a 25% drop in sales. That after a year of not doing any television ads. And why is that? Well, if these ads stop, even if they're annoying, you talk about them with your partner. Or your mother, I don't know. And that has an effect. It will stay top of mind. And after a while, you don't talk about that brand anymore. And some people will still buy that brand because it's the best one. But a group of people is just not that loyal and gets influenced by other ads. What happens with strong or sole focus on data is that leads to focusing on marketing activities that are all the way at the bottom of the funnel. Before you all think that I hate conversion optimization, I don't, especially for your checkout, conversion optimization is really, really important. If your checkout is not well optimized, people will probably have a hard time filling out reforms. It will not be accessible. Maybe you have usability issues. It's not intuitive. These things will have a huge effect on your sales immediately. So you should also do that. However, if you focus on data and only on data, you will always choose conversion optimization over content marketing. You will always choose growth hacking over brand awareness campaigns. You will always choose Google ads over trying to rank with good articles in the search engines. And you will go to work with influencers and affiliates because they give you a good return on investment metric instead of going and supporting a community like the WordPress community. And I think that doing the community part, especially in WordPress, is much more effective. But you have to take my word for it because it will be extremely hard to measure that. And it gets worse because the data that we used to have when I started 10 years ago is not the same data that we have today. The internet and Google and people are changing. This thing has huge effects. And if you think that the demands on privacy are going to get lower in the coming years, they'll probably not be. The GDPR or the cookie consent or the blocking of cookies means that your data is getting more skewed, less reliable. It's just of less quality. And also you see Google's reporting going towards focusing more and more on last click attribution because they want to buy ads. So it's going to be really hard to measure anything else than direct effects. And you know, websites and the internet are changing so much. When I entered this space 10 years ago, people 15 years ago it was the same, but that wasn't here yet. So 15 years ago people would click on a link, one of the 10 blue links in Google. You only had blue links then. You would come to a category or landing page. You would browse that website and you would convert it. You could measure that. But nowadays Google answers to questions mostly in search engine result pages. Audiences don't even come to your website anymore. And people like me still searching Google, but my daughter uses TikTok and YouTube to find things. If you want to know more about this thing that Google is changing, I would recommend you to watch the talk of Jess Schultz. She did a wonderful talk at your school in 2023. It's really, really good and it's right there on the internet. You published it. So it's a wonderful talk. You should ask yourself, even if people don't come to your website but they have like this great experience in the search engine result page, isn't that valuable marketing? If they have a good, good answer to their questions and they're like, yes, this is it. Then that could be really valuable marketing. You just can't measure it. But once again, just because you can't measure it does not mean that it's not valuable. You really are a data nerd and you really, really want to measure exactly the effects of your campaigns. You'll end up doing ads, affiliates, conversion optimization, growth hacking, focusing on last clicks, focusing on direct effects. And we've known for a hundred years that it does not work like that. So now what? Now this we can't do this anymore. And it's not what I'm saying. You should do something else as well. What should we do instead? So this is my favorite piece of advice and it's applicable in any situation. Use your brain. If you don't know what to say to someone, want to give them advice, just do this one. It's always correct. Next to using your brain and thinking about what would work. There's also a hundred years of marketing research that could help you. I am a big fan of A-B testing. I'm really, really am. But you don't have to test everything because there is a lot of knowledge about how the human brain works. And you don't have to test and find everything out for yourself. And it's good to focus on evidence. I'm a scientist. I like evidence. Just focus on the right evidence. And that begins with interpreting, tracking and conversion data just for what they are. They're not pretentious data. They don't feel like they're better than anyone else. But they're just at the very end of the funnel. Treat them that way. That's the final step, the final skill you're making. They can say a lot. They just can't say everything. What I think you should do is to really try to understand what your audience wants. What their problems are. How they use the internet. How do they use your marketing? Where are they? What channels do they use? And adapt to that. Because you have to. Because if users don't do Google anymore, then you should be somewhere else. And you could do a lot of qualitative user research. Me saying qualitative is a bit funny. If I would say that 10 years ago, then my husband would commit me somewhere because I was all about the numbers. But I think in understanding your audience, this is really important. And that having a strong, this is what they want. This is what their problems are. It's almost impossible to do that in a quantitative way. And what I want all of you to do is think about why a certain marketing campaign would be important. And then test that hypothesis. So instead of data driven, which is in the university in science, that's like swearing. You can't be data driven. You have to be theory driven. So you have to have the why question at hand and in the central. And then use the data, the data to be used to test that theory and see whether or not you're correct. So how would that work? So for example, you want to do a brand awareness campaign and you listen to the stock. And I think it's a good idea to have a booth on a WordCamp. If you are very small, please don't begin with a booth on a WordCamp. It's pretty expensive. But still, let's say you want to do a booth on a WordCamp. How do you measure success? You want to increase brand awareness. We already know that it will probably won't lead to sales. So if you think that having that booth will get more people to know about your brand, to talk about your brand, then you should measure that. Can you measure an increase in the number of brand mentions on socials, in Slack, in newsletters, in anywhere after that WordCamp appeared? Because then you're doing raising brand awareness. If you do multiple camps, are you then introducing yourself in the first one and does everybody know your name on the last one? Then you have succeeded. So try to find other ways to measure brand awareness. Because that's what you're trying to do instead of trying to increase sales because that will not happen directly. Consequences if you take this approach will mean that you'll have to collect additional data, often. Because Google Analytics will not give you those data. And you'll have to accept that you will never have complete certainty. And also this is also a good life advice. Because you never have complete certainty about anything. So this is just it. Accept that. And what also is really important is that you'll gradually, when you're doing this as a marketer, get a better understanding of what your audience is about. But then, this is a good tip also for myself, write that down. Because if you're doing all these tests but don't write down what you found out, people are going to say to you that you do things based on feelings. And well, you can get very offended by that. And it's just not true, but I never wrote it down. That's the thing I'm learning for myself now. Let's summarize what I told you today. The available data that we all use in Google Analytics, all the tracking data, is focused on the very end of the marketing funnel. And that's okay if you treat it like that. But the pitfall of data-driven marketing is not to focus on all the things that are up in the funnel. And you'll end up with doing only marketing efforts at the end. And the quality of the data because of GDPR and cookies in Google is getting worse. So it's even harder to measure those direct effects properly. What you should do instead is focus on high-quality marketing campaigns that matter and resonate with your audiences. See, I'm always within time. That's it. Thank you.