Don’t measure what you won’t change

Don’t measure what you won’t change.

This is my central message of a talk I gave at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum on social media analytics. We’ve got tons of social media data, more than ever. We can download analytics from most social media platforms in excruciating detail.

Yes, Facebook actually gives you 10+ tabs of data to work with about every post in a time period.

There are entire companies whose sole reason for existence is to interpret the social media data we get every day.

We have no shortage of data. We have no shortage of analytics tools.

But the question is, based on all your data and analysis, what will you actually change?

What will you do differently?

More often than not, the marketers I speak to say things like:

They’re understaffed or under budget.
They don’t have time.
They don’t have content.
Their legal team puts strict parameters on what they can and can’t say.

Ultimately, their core message is: we won’t change what we’re doing.

If your cooking won’t improve, why measure diner satisfaction?
If you won’t exercise more and eat less, why get on the scale?
If you won’t change how you spend, why do a budget?

If you won’t change what you’re doing, don’t waste time, energy, and money on measuring, unless you’re making a case for permission or authority to change.

Marketing analytics is about measuring and understanding change. If change is off the table, functionally, so are analytics.

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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.