Practical Marketing Analytics

Don’t Confuse Your Funnel With Reality

May 28, 2014 Industry News, Marketing, Marketing And Advertising Analytics, Optimization, Search Analytics, Web Analytics

Models are supposed to make it easier to see useful patterns, but if you devote enough time to using them you can forget you are looking at a simplified view of reality and not reality itself. The marketing funnel is a great example of how this can happen.

When you are trying get a holistic view of your marketing plan, it is often helpful to segment the audience according to where they are on the path from never having heard of your brand to the end state of buying your product. It can make things clearer. Let’s say you have done some analysis of the buying process for your product and you have found that people move through it like this:

Let’s further say your numbers say that the conversion rates for a given month look like this:

The numbers indicate that once someone is researching your product you have a really good chance of making them a customer. Depending on your cost per acquisition and the value of your product, you’d probably want to step up your efforts to drive them to your site.

Would that still be your conclusion if you knew that:

The list of complicating factors could go on and on. The point is, you are looking at a model. Don’t forget there is a particularly complicated reality behind any marketing model: the mind of the buyer.