American author Will Rogers is attributed with this rather caustic one-liner from the 1930’s.
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and went to California, the average intelligence of both states went up."
It has since been used by many people, including Robert Muldoon, the former New Zealand Prime Minister, about his countrymen migrating to Australia. I’m proud to say that I am personally responsible for improving the average health of many cancer patients – another example of the “Will Rogers Phenomenon”. A while ago I was at the un-healthy end of the “Stage 2” cancer segment, but after a couple of scans and no change in my overall condition I was popped into the “Stage 4” cancer segment along with some really ill people. In that single action I had improved the “average health” of both segments . How barmy is that?
These examples show us that averages can be misleading and confusing. So, what do we get when we open up our web analytics reports or our email campaign dashboard? Averages! I’d like you to stay awake long enough to convince you that averages are a bad, bad thing in digital marketing and here’s why...
“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 1 – Site Conversion Rate
Let’s take an “average” site conversion rate. It’s probably 3%. That’s average. But just a couple of simple steps gets us to a better place – how about conversion rate between new and repeat visitors, or conversion rate by source of traffic? A couple of clicks and you’re somewhere exciting. As Avinash Kaushik would say “BAM!! Context, Baby!” You find that repeat visitors are probably 3 times more likely to convert than first-timers, or that people coming from your Facebook invitation-only group convert 10 times better than people clicking on banners. So get into some pretty basic segmentation to give some meaning to what you’re doing. Here’s how Matthew Tod of Logan Tod demonstrates it.
See, conversions from banners are much worse than “average” and conversions from previous customers is much higher than “average”. In short, it looks like people don’t buy on their first visit from any source, but will probably buy if they are returning visitors or past customers. We could drill further and find out what products drove highest re-purchase rates, or what creative/media gave the best conversion rate....there may be some winners lost among the “average”. More segmentation; more context; more correct actions taken!
“Utterly Useless Action” to improve average site conversion rates? Turn off your marketing.
I’d like to thank Matthew Tod for this one, too. Promotional activity will drive prospects to your site and they are unlikely to buy...but some of them will. Trouble is, they drag down the average conversion rate. So switch off all your campaigns and watch those averages soar. The only people who will come to the site will be your family, close friends and past customers - and they love you. Average conversion much better, sales volumes plummeting.
Be careful what you wish for.
“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 2 – Email Click-through rate
Here is a list of average metrics from Mailchimp.
Email marketers feel a sense of “market sector envy” creeping in as they look jealously at how big the averages are elsewhere. Art has a 26% click-through rate and Arts_Music has a feeble 5%. And what about Education getting a whopping 181% click-through rate? Does the average relate to how good they are compared to other sectors, and if you have a low average are you a bad, bad marketer?
The trouble here is that we are worrying about “soft” outcomes – even if we do improve our average open and click rates we will not necessarily improve our revenue, or net yield.
If you want to improve your click-through rate you could probably make everything you wanted people to know about on a web page.
"Find out how many points you earned last month - click here"
Bingo! A quick and easy way to improve average click-through rates, and here's another...
“Utterly Useless Action” to improve Average Click-Through rates? Don’t mail non-openers.
So let’s really improve the average click-through rate. Below is a graph showing what happens when you mail lots of "emotionally un-subscribed". If the number of customers (who love you) is low, then the average click through rate will be, well, average!
But stop mailing people who have not opened for over a year as part of the same campaign. Drop them into a different programme and the composition of the file will change. You will have fewer non-clickers and your average click through rate will shoot up like this:
I have been banging on for years about “open” and “click” rates being “soft metrics” and I’m sure I’ll blog about that again soon. In the meantime let’s all just agree that improving “average” click through rates is an utterly meaningless objective. Getting the “emotionally un-subscribed” to click on something is good, but judge yourself by what “outcomes” you deliver and then you’ll be adding value to your marketing activity.
We really need to segment out the non-openers and treat them differently (test From fields, Subject Lines, Preview Panes, time of day, day of week, text only messages etc etc) and you will be able to improve the open rate for non-openers. Just don't mix them up with your best customers or you'll never be able to be relevant and engaging to all of them.
So there you are. If your company's "bean counters" want you to improve averages, tell them that it may not be what they really want. Increased clicks, sales, order values by all means. But not averages, please.
And how about this for one final silly average...Twitter users have more than the average number of ears. That’s because nobody has 3 ears (apart from Davy Crockett with his “wild front ear”), but a few people will have only one or no ears. So dividing the total number of ears by the total number of users we have a figure of 1.99 something, so most people have more than the average number of ears.
As I said, Barmy, isn't it?