Mean Streets: the perils of buying clicks

You may have seen our pre­vi­ous videos cen­tred around the theme of ‘do you know what your mar­ket­ing is doing’? Most recent­ly we’ve had ‘woo woo’ on social media fads, and before that we had **‘click, baby click’ **show­ing that impres­sions don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to sales.

In my pre­vi­ous blog I spoke about con­tent mar­ket­ing. On the oppo­site end of the spec­trum to con­tent mar­ket­ing is the prac­tice of pur­chas­ing clicks, likes, fol­low­ers etc. We’ve cre­at­ed a video called mean streets, and, whilst I don’t want to spoil the end­ing, I can safe­ly say buy­ing clicks nev­er ends well. There’s actu­al­ly 2 dif­fer­ent end­ings, and we would love to know which one you pre­fer by retweet­ing your favourite.

So which do you pre­fer? Retweet to vote:

Mean Streets: Wife

“You were buy­ing clicks? What will I tell the chil­dren!?” http://t.co/cIef34IvbP http://t.co/dchRNhk778

— Mar­ket­ing Cloud (@AdobeMktgCloud) Octo­ber 27, 2014

Mean Streets: Hold­ing Cell

Mar­ket­ing jar­gon won’t get you out of this sit­u­a­tion — say no to buy­ing clicks: http://t.co/cIef34IvbP http://t.co/6G80LiFkMK

— Mar­ket­ing Cloud (@AdobeMktgCloud) Octo­ber 27, 2014

So why do we pro­duce these videos?

It all goes back to this ques­tion of whether you know what your mar­ket­ing is doing. In our ‘drama­tised’ exam­ple we see an indi­vid­ual that, under the weight of his quar­ter­ly rev­enue tar­gets, is look­ing for a ‘cheap’ way to get by. And should the shady trans­ac­tion have gone through, he may well have increased some indi­vid­ual met­rics with his invest­ment but it’s a very expen­sive way to run your marketing.

If you blind­ly chase and pres­sure your teams to meet a set of met­rics which aren’t tied back into your busi­ness and wider mar­ket­ing goals, you’ll end up in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion, (per­haps a lit­tle less extreme.. ) But you’ll be spend­ing mon­ey on mar­ket­ing that has lit­tle or no return nevertheless.

Not all traf­fic is cre­at­ed equal

There’s a huge amount we can do as mar­keters to ensure prop­er tar­get­ing and per­son­al­i­sa­tion. There is also the long term view, and I’d refer you back to my post on con­tent mar­ket­ing, where­by you’re build­ing rela­tion­ships, you’re cre­at­ing SEO val­ue and estab­lish­ing your brand as a thought leader. As a mar­keter you need to look at the key data points avail­able to you and draw action­able insight. Of course you want vis­i­tors to your web­site, but you need to know why they are vis­it­ing. The vis­i­tor is reveal­ing that they have an inter­est in *some­thing* when they vis­it your web­page – it might not nec­es­sar­i­ly be what you think it is – but it’s up to us as mar­keters to under­stand and opti­mise their experience.

My key takeaways