In this post, Seth Godin writes about taking the high road. I want to lead with his summary paragraph, because the high road is too often seen as prima donna boulevard.

“Data is your friend. And the data shows that the top blogs, top lenses, top magazines… they all follow the high road. If you need to be manipulative or non-transparent to make a buck, time to rethink the plan.”

My point is, for anyone in emerging media marketing, pretty much from here forward, the creative and the analytics are inextricably linked.

Campaign analytics have progressed to a place where very few people in a company’s marketing department are going to ignore them. Especially in digital media.

One of the benefits of analytics is that the more you understand them, the quicker you can assess the latest emerging technologies and how to create for them.

I break campaign metrics down into 3 sequential categories:

1. Response
2. Engagement
3. Conversion

That roughly parallels the buying decision funnel.

1. How does the customer respond to the general proposition you’re offering?
2. Does that proposition keep their interest and cause them to dig deeper?
3. At the end of the day, did they want the product? And if not, where did it fall through?

Campaigns today are fluid. Or at least they should be. The creative job no longer ends at campaign launch. That’s when things really heat up.

Of course, analytics aren’t perfect. People flush their cookies. They use different computers. The husband sends the link to his wife, who makes the purchase.

But marketing will probably never be about perfection. It’s about information that improves your intuition. It reminds me of a quote that fits digital marketing tightly:

“It’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”