Stop worshipping the dashboard

I had been eyeing a brilliant, expensive pair of boots online for months. Instagram kept retargeting me. I thought about them, asked friends, checked Reddit for reviews, and then moved on. I would get it close to my birthday in May, I thought. To my luck, in May, I saw a discount ad for the same product, but didn’t click. Got distracted by the gurgling of my four month-old—my current default distraction.

That evening, I remembered and Googled the brand. First result: a paid ad. I clicked. Shamelessly. I could’ve scrolled to the organic link, but I didn’t. Two minutes later, the purchase was done.

Now, let’s switch to the digital marketer’s lens.

The report will show my purchase as a branded search conversion. That’s high ROAS territory. Budgets will now be reallocated there. A fancier team will show a multi-click attribution trail: first touch via Instagram in December, retargeted via display, final conversion via branded search. Someone else will credit the discount. Loyalty teams will claim the sale too.

What’s wrong? Everything! If you go back to my journey, there isn’t a funnel-shaped flow I followed. Every ad (barring the first one), time spent on the website, what medium I used to finally purchase, whether I opened their email none of it had any influence on me before I bought. Like most consumers, I don’t really care about brands. I have a lot more to care about—my four-month-old is one such example. I loved the ad and the product; the website was easy to navigate with the right information. I like shoes, so I buy them slightly more often than the average buyer. I was willing to experiment with this new brand. When the time came, I bought. That’s it.

But most digital marketers focus on the wrong metrics. The digital dashboard effect is real: easy to measure does not equal important.

Here are some of the metrics, I believe, we should take with a pinch of salt. They are not wrong. They are important to know, but for very different reasons. If these metrics are guiding your performance media plan, you need to take a step back and rethink your strategy.

Time spent on website

Unless you are in content business (news, gaming, e-learning) time spent on the website doesn’t really matter. Yes, if someone is in the mood to browse, they will browse. If someone knows what they want, they will pick it up immediately—in that case, the less time spent, the better your user experience.

Look at it this way: do you ever measure the success of a store visit campaign by the number of people who visited or the amount of time they spent in your store?

Repeat purchase

This needs an entire book written on it (or maybe it already has been), but brands need to stop obsessing over repeat purchase metrics. I see ad gurus on LinkedIn make up fictional metrics like ‘Time to repeat purchase’ and create their own formulae for success. Repeat purchase happens at random. Everyone is a loyal customer, polygamously. The level of loyalty differs by the size of your brand. Don’t focus on creating loyalty marketing strategies just yet. Focus on acquiring customers, the new customers.

How loyal do you think I will be to a shoe brand? And how many boots can I purchase in a year, even if I am 100% loyal to them?

Engagement rate on ads: A high engagement rate doesn’t always mean your ad is working or entertaining. Measuring this metric can lead to creating ads that don’t really do anything for the brand.

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR tells you who clicked, not who bought. It’s useful for diagnostics, and I personally give it a lot of importance in performance campaigns. But it is dangerous to consider it as the north star, especially in brand awareness campaigns. Optimising for CTR often leads to bait-y creatives rather than meaningful communication.

Last-click attribution (LCA)

Giving excessive importance to LCA is like crediting the waiter for the entire restaurant experience. LCA ignores all the invisible, long-term brand-building and rewards only the final nudge. It needs to be highly underestimated, given how many decisions are made based on the last click in the digital marketing world.

Discounting cycles

I would like to put it as politely as possible: discounting and pricing are not the jobs of your digital ads team. Discounting is a drug. It should be used very, very carefully. Read what Les Binet has to say about discounting and its effects. It gives a false impression most times of high sales. It does little to bring in new customers or move the overall top-line. When you see a discount/sales-effect slide in the digital ads report, please, by all means, skip it.

Every digital marketer should understand the foundations of marketing; that’s non-negotiable. Instead of focusing on discount cycles or bounce rate, spend some time analysing what mental market share your brand enjoys or what the category entry points are. Focus on incremental sales, unduplicated reach, and even though some academics don’t recommend it, I still believe in the power of unbiased brand lift studies and share of search analysis.

The last click wasn’t the full story

Digital marketing isn’t broken; it is just distracted. We are letting dashboards shape decisions while ignoring how people actually buy. If we zoom out, we will realise that real-world purchase journeys don’t follow a neat funnel. They follow moods, moments, timing, and sometimes, birthdays and baby distractions.

Those shoes I bought? They weren’t a last-click success story. Not even a multi-touch-funnel flow success story. They were a brand success story. One that began months ago with a great product, a memorable ad, and a brand that stayed just visible enough until I was ready to buy.

Let’s break up the fight between metrics, it’s going nowhere.

Citations:

• How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp (Oxford University Press, 2010)

• The Long and the Short of It by Les Binet (IPA, 2013)

— Yash Chandiramani, founder and chief strategist, Admatazz.