Hey, Those Are People on Your Site: Why Counting Clicks Doesn’t Work

Who decided that counting clicks is the only way to go if you want to know how your business is performing? And when did we, as consumers, readers, bloggers, and tweeters abdicate our rights to be viewed as people (individual people, to be precise) by online companies?

Think about it: I’m clicking, but I’m not a click and neither are you. And, while I’m clicking, I tend to spend my time and money with companies that try to offer me something that is relevant and fulfills my needs as an individual, not an ambiguous click.

Ironically, it seems that many multi-channel companies have built something of a walled garden around their online marketing campaigns versus offline campaigns. This division is problematic to me: first it implies that the way I interact online with a brand is completely divorced from the way I experience that same brand offline. This, I’m sure you’ll agree, is certainly not the way for a brand to treat a consumer. Secondly, this short-sited approach deprives me, the consumer, of a consistent brand experience based not only on the fundamental principles of the brand but on my many past interactions with the brand. Simply put, companies that don’t use their online customer data as an anchor for offline campaigns and vice versa are doing their customers a tremendous disservice.

Which brings me back to clicks. The only way to build a contextually relevant brand experience is to firstly acknowledge that you’re trying to reach people with a message or offer, not clicks, and to secondly build increasingly relevant, targeted campaigns based on what people are doing offline and online.

I don’t recall ever seeing marketers talk about improving the click experience or building Click Loyalty programs.  They focus on designing great Customer experiences and building Customer Loyalty programs for a reason.  And that’s how we see it at Coremetrics; marketers of great brands are going to think about Customers and not Clicks.  They are going to use customer information from offline and online to build programs that increase the relevance for customers no matter what channel they interact in.  To do this, combining multi-channel customer data will become paramount to offering a great customer, not click, experience.