Metrics, analytics, ROI. These are what digital marketing was built on, but what if the reports that you’re using to make marketing decisions are no longer valid?

I think that the only thing that moves faster, in digital marketing, than new technologies is the way that technology is used. What used to be considered common knowledge, in many instances is no longer relevant.

To clear things up we’re going to review The 7 Digital Marketing Myths!

Myth #1: High Bounce Rates Are Bad

Ok, this one isn’t completely a myth, but it does need some clarification. It used to be that people would look at their overall bounce rate and panic.

Bounce rate really needs to be looked at on a page-by-page basis. If you’re just looking at your site’s bounce rate from the Google Analytics overview report, you have to remember that this is taking into account all of the pages within your website.

This is including pages like blog posts and landing pages. It’s normal to have near 100% bounce rate on blog posts and landing pages. So, if your site has a large number of blog posts and landing pages, then it’s going to skew your overall bounce rate numbers.

Myth #2: More Traffic Solves Everything

Traffic is important, no question, but not all traffic is good traffic. Here are a couple of examples of traffic that is not good:

  • Traffic from a geography that you don’t service. If you’re a local retail business and don’t sell Internationally, traffic from other countries are not helping you sell more.
  • Bot traffic, in general, is not good traffic. Now, the caveat here is that you do want the search engine bots to visit your site. However, there are a lot of bots out there that are not coming from search engines. And, they are all being counted as “traffic” which skews your perception of what is actually happening on your site.

Myth #3: CTR Tells The Story

Click-Through Rates have been held up as proof positive that an ad or an email message or even campaigns were successful. Unfortunately, CTR’s don’t tell the whole story. CTR’s simply show you how many people used a link to land on your site. It doesn’t indicate business impact or conversions.

CTR is, however, important as a component of your analytics picture. If you’re using analytics to identify marketing attribution, then your CTR will be an important component of the attribution. But, on its own CTR does not a metric that proves value.

Myth #4: There Is Only 1 Conversion

More often than not, that last click gets all of the credit for the conversion. When someone fills out that “Contact Us” form, your “Request A Quote” form, or they pay for the products in their shopping cart.

The fact is that there were a lot of conversions that happened before anyone ever filled out a form or paid for an item:

  • Someone sees your site’s listing on a search result and clicks. That’s a conversion.
  • Someone engages with a page or pages on your site to learn more. That’s a conversion.
  • Someone downloads a spec sheet, white paper, or case study from your site. That’s a conversion.

There are a lot of conversions that lead up to a sale. Don’t forget to include all of the conversions within your reporting and decision making.

Myth #5: Measuring Marketing ROI Is Easy

Oh nay, nay! Measuring marketing’s ROI is not easy and probably never will be easy. There have never been more marketing channels than there is right now. Your customers have never been as active on multiple channels than they are right now. And, neither of these facts are going to change anytime soon. That means that the job of compiling all of the data from all of the channels can become quite daunting. And, if you don’t plan out the strategy for how to collect all of the data from all of these channels, the job of proving ROI will be impossible.

Myth #6: Everyone Hates Marketing Emails

Don’t let your personal feelings about email marketing cloud a decision that could vastly improve your company’s growth.

It is true that poorly done email marketing is a pain and does not work. That doesn’t mean that email marketing, as a whole, doesn’t work. The answer is not to eliminate email marketing from your marketing toolbox. The answer is to do your email marketing the right way.

How do you do it the right way?

  • Have people opt-in to your email list. Don’t send to people from a list that you purchased.
  • Don’t over-send to your list. Make sure that the frequency that you’re sending at is appropriate for what your audience wants.
  • Make sure that the information that you are sending is relevant to the people that are receiving it. This may take a little bit of work while you’re setting up your email lists, but it will pay huge dividends in the long run.

Myth #7: SEO Is Dead

I find it amazing that at least once a year there sprout up a whole series of postings and articles proclaiming that SEO (organic optimization) is dead for one reason or another. This myth is especially frustrating because 1) nothing could be further from the truth and 2) by promoting this kind of garbage people are actually hurting the businesses that adopt this as truth and stop working on their SEO.

SEO is alive and well, however, just like everything digital, it’s vastly different today than it was even a couple of years ago. The techniques that were used in the past no longer work. Google’s mobile index has dramatically impacted the SEO world. And, social is a part of Google’s algorithm.

SEO success today depends on a holistic approach to organic optimization. A good holistic SEO strategy will address the 3 areas of optimization; on-page, off-page, and technical. And, it will also focus on the user’s experience (UX). By using a holistic approach, you’ll find that not only is SEO not dead, but this approach will give you greater organic search results than you’ve every seen using the old ways.