StoresOnline Presents: 8 Online Marketing Myths

StoresOnline has brought you many marketing tips as well as advice on SEO tools that would be helpful for StoresOnline Merchants. When we came across this article about Online Marketing Myths, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to share it with you.

Introduction and Myth 1

Sure, you've heard it all before -- but is everything we hear right? We asked digital media experts to go against the grain and debunk some commonly held wisdom about the business. Some of these truisms used to be true but are no longer; others are legacies of the traditional advertising world. And one of them might depend on whether you're on the client or agency side of the table.

How many of these theories do you think are ready for the trash heap?

1. You should measure everything you can.

Solid measurement has always been touted as digital media's key to resolving John Wanamaker's doubts about which 50 percent of his advertising worked. There's no end to the geeking out we can do with data, and it seems like every month there's a new metric and a new analytics vendor. The more, the better, right?

Well, no. Sometimes, the more data you have, the less it makes sense.

"I'm from research -- and I think that's a myth," says Todd Kirby, research director for Spark Communications. "If you have enough evidence to show something is working, why do you need to have more research to back it up?"

But marketers keep asking media agencies for more and more proof that their advertising is working. And that's probably the interactive industry's own fault -- for perpetually hammering on the measurement nail. Nevertheless, despite clients' demands for measurement, Peter Platt, VP of online media for Butler/Till Media, finds that clients ultimately avoid his reports. "It amazes me how often we start a campaign, have the metrics established and document how we'll report," Platt says. "But when it's time to go over the reports, the clients keep putting off the meeting."

That's probably because those reports seem so very daunting. And, the more metrics they address, the more daunting they become. The result, Platt says, is that the information doesn't get acted on as frequently as it needs to. "It's good to measure all those things, but not necessarily good to dwell on the minutia," he says.

Brian Hadley's solution to metrics overload is this: Start with the end in mind. Hadley, media director of Cole & Weber United, a WPP agency in Seattle, advises clients to decide on one ultimate goal and then identify meaningful milestones along the way to that goal. "It's defining success and also developing a measuring stick," he says.

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