Guessing = Messing

I read two things this morning while, while superficially unrelated, raised the same issue in my warped mind. I’ll share them with you and would love to hear what you think.
The first piece comes courtesy of the 2010 Omniture Online Analytics Benchmark Survey and the second via comScore figures released by the Newspaper National Network and reported by Media Post.
First, Omniture. Omniture has a great interest in having companies measure things. After all, that’s what they do – help people measure things. So while we can argue that the results I’m going to share with you are self-serving, I find them really startling.

• 80% believe ROI from on-line marketing activities is important to measure, but only 31% of marketers can effectively measure it
• 86% of respondents think conversion rate from on-line marketing activities is important to measure, but 25% cannot effectively measure it
• 69.1% of respondents are using social media in their marketing efforts.  41% of those using social media lack a mechanism to measure social media conversion

In other words, they’re guessing.  Imagine driving a car with no glass.  You know you’re moving, you know how fast, but you have no clue where you are or where you’re going (or what you’re hitting!).  Not for me, thanks, and when clients and I discuss business objectives we always talk about how we’re going to measure results.  If the things on which we’re focusing aren’t really measurable, we find others that are.

The other piece is related in my mind because it also involves guessing:

Newspaper Web sites continue to grow in popularity, with online newspaper operations in the top 25 media markets reaching 83.7 million unique visitors in April — up 10% from March, 12% from February, and 15% from January of this year, according to comScore figures released by the Newspaper National Network.

These visitors generated a total of more than 2 billion page views in April, up 24% from 1.6 billion page views in January.

So where’s the guess-work?  As I’ve said before the desire for the content the newspapers generate isn’t going away even as the platform through which it’s consumed changes.  The guess-work seems to be on the business model – how to make money with high-demand content, a growing audience base, and fairly good engagement.  Yet newspapers continue to lose money, even in digital, at an alarming rate.  Guessing, as evidenced by many starts and stops, at a business model isn’t helping.

Imagine the two put together – guessing at a business model and an inability to measure what’s working.  Hmm….

Thoughts?