I Am Addicted To Stats, Analytics, and KPI
Stats, analytics, they help you stay on track, right? Until they paralyze you and make you stare at dashboards for hours
There’s one great thing about the internet, it’s that everything is measurable. Pretty much everything is trackable. In fact, sites collect so much data, that we can even predict the unpredictable. Some companies claim they can understand how a potential client behaves and consumes the content on their sites based on the mouse movements of the users. Isn’t that insane?
Whether you own a blog, a website, a Medium profile, a Soundcloud account, anything, there is almost always an analytics or statistics page that you can check.
And these metrics and analytics seem useful. You need to make sure that people visit your site, consume your content, like it, and so on.
But here is the truth: we blame teenagers for being addicted to likes and follower counts, but us marketers aren’t better. We’re addicted to stats, analytics, KPI.
I don’t know you, and maybe you’re one of the few that staring at analytics and stats all day. If that’s the case, congrats! You can stop reading now.
But I’m an addict.
There is not a day that goes by without me checking my analytics, multiple times a day, on every single website that provides some.
That’s actually how I start my day.
“How did my ads perform for these 7 hours while I was asleep, when all my potential clients probably were too”
And then I get stuck in my thoughts. How can I make these metrics better? What metrics matter more? Why was my traffic so low at 3:30 am this morning? How can I improve my conversion rate at 5 am? Are my blog posts with question titles perform better than others? Why are some of my articles performing better on Medium than on my blog?
That’s a lot of doubts and thoughts to have at 6:10 am, while still being in bed.
So yes, recently, I’ve been realizing how absurd it is to start my day like that, and how ridiculous it was to wonder about these details. So now, I wait a few hours.
That’s not fixing the issue though. Of course not.
Because at 8 am, when I’ll be checking my analytics for the first time of the day, I’d still have the same thoughts.
But why are these thoughts bad? Because they have an influence on my creative process.
I’d be noticing that blog posts with question titles perform slightly better for example. So from now on, all I write will be question titles articles. Same with posting on social media. I would be noticing that posting at 1 pm performs slightly better than posting at 6 pm, so I only post at 1 pm now.
But aren’t these reasons what analytics are for though?
To some extent yes. It’s useful to know that questions engage better than other types of blog posts for me. But how much better do they perform? They get 5 to 10% more views, at max. Is it that significant? Is it actually the style of the title that brings in the extra view? Or better promotion, better content?
My content needs a better long-term vision than just optimizing a couple of KPI on a dashboard. And your content deserves better than that too.
Spending this much time looking at analytics makes me unable to see the bigger picture. I give these stats so much power that it has a massive impact on my creative process, where I would sometimes not post or not create content because I would think that they wouldn’t perform well, making my analytics go down.
But I’m the only one giving any sort of value to these numbers. None of my readers or clients really look at these figures. And they don’t really care.
I’m addicted and obsessed with figures that don’t make any practical sense, that narrow my perception and turn down my creative process, and that no one care about!
Who cares if your views went up by 7% today? Who cares if that article that you really wanted to write got 12 impressions? What matters is that you put out the content and that it exists.
Of course, I can’t stop using analytics entirely. They’re such a big part of my job as a marketer. But here’s my plan to try to have a healthier relationship to these figures:
- I’ll only check analytics once a day
- I’ll only check analytics at the end of the day — after the content has been created
- I will write down the adjustments I want to do after looking at these analytics, but not actually do them yet
- In the morning, I’ll review these adjustments, and figure out which ones still seem relevant
Will this plan fix my issue? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to keep you all posted about it.
I will probably go through pretty severe withdrawal. But I’m very excited to feel what it’s like to be liberated from these intrusive numbers, that numb my mind, my creativity, and my long term vision.
Do you feel like you tried everything to grow on social media and especially Instagram? Hopefully, what follows will be the last thing you will have to do to reach your goals.
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