Money makes the marketing go ‘round I’d say, paraphrasing a famous and dear song. It seems that money is also the main cause of poor online measurement as discovered by a survey of almost 900 client-side respondents with findings included in the 98 pages of Econsultancy/Lynchpin Online Measurement and Strategy Report. 50% of these respondents mentioned money as a main barrier, and this is quite an impressive percentage!
42% of the supply-side respondents consider that the lack of understanding/don’t know what to measure is in fact the most important barrier standing in the way of an efficient online measurement.
Other causes stopping people from implementing a successful online measurement strategy were siloed organisation/lack of co-ordination, mentioned by 25% of the client-side respondents, and lack of strategy, also mentioned by 25% of the queried people. Lack of senior and buy-in and ownership wad quoted by 24% as a main barrier, followed by too many systems and technologies and difficult reconciling data. In the client-side segment, only 18% of the respondents mentioned lack of understanding as a main barrier.
In what the supply-side is concerned, other elements stopping the respondents to have a great online measurement strategy were lack of budget and resources, mentioned by 39% of them and a lack of strategy, quoted by 35% of the participants in the survey.
When it comes to frustrations with web analytics, company respondents mentioned lack of consistency, strategy, time, investment in people, while the agencies focused on a lack of client understanding of the data and the costs involved.
Looking at these barriers quoted by clients and agencies, I cannot help noticing that they seem to be the same in many other marketing related areas. And yes, money is a sensitive aspect: agencies need money to learn and to do their jobs properly, while clients try to be as careful as possible with their resources and, of course, pay the smallest possible fee.
Also, it looks like there is never the same perspective on the same thing from the client side and the agency side – and sometimes, I might add, it is really hard to reach a common ground. Another thing to acknowledge is that the barriers mentioned this year are really similar with those mentioned in the past, therefore we can argue that not many things have changed. Will they change in the future?