We get a lot of questions from our clients about Metrics. How do we know if our campaign is successful? How do we know if it worked? What kind of stats can we give someone to prove this was a success? How can we track this.

Here is our unfiltered, gods-honest truth. You know it when you see it, and all stats are bunk. They can, will, and are always tailored to make a campaign look like a success. In our opinion, you’re wasting your money buying any tracking packages – there are perfectly good ones that tell you everything you need to know, for more or less for free. In our opinion, companies that track the success of viral efforts are bunk. Companies that track “buzz” are bunk.

There is, of course, much to be learned by looking at the traffic on your site, and there is much to be learned from things like the number of clicks a banner gets, and the number of times a video was downloaded from YouTube. These, however, are only useful comparing them against other campaigns, and the same metrics. 1 Million YouTube downloads isn’t a lot. 10 million page views sounds great but may or may not mean anything, depending on the circumstances.

There are a lot of marketing people out there who have grown very comfortable and happy with the statistics they can get on the broadcast side. Statistics are ridiculously well kept on that side. You can see the needle move in sales and calculate, to the penny, exactly how much money a campaign made you. God, if I were a marketing exec I would be eating that stuff up – I’d have paid some 18 year old programmer a bunch of money to make me a set of widgets for my computer that let me see, to the second, how effective my advertising was. In fact, I’m willing to wager that this already exists.

The challenge, then, is that these types of marketing people are hearing a lot of great stuff about the web. They’re hearing how it’s trackable, and it’s the great white hope for high bang-for-your-buck advertising.

This is all true. There is a ridiculous level of tracking ability with certain kinds of web advertising. And this, my friends, is where the catch lies. You can track a banner through to a website through to sales perfectly. You cannot track an online video game’s emotional impact on a customer and how it helped them to buy one type of cereal over another. It’s the age old branding vs. sales approach to advertising – it exists on the web just like everywhere else. Compound this with the fact that there is no means to compare, say, $1million spent on the Internet directly against $1million spent in print. And on top of that, there’s no way to tell yet, at all, if having 10 million people download your ad on YouTube was worth anything.

For a metrics-based marketer, it’s all kind of a nightmare. The temptation is, then, when moving your marketing dollars to the Internet, to place your money in media that is tracked – banners, websites – over media that is not – phantom campaigns, advergames, MySpace groups. This is not unreasonable, however, it is easy to forget: Just because an advertising vehicle is more trackable does not necessarily mean its more effective. You may measure greater success with ad vehicle A over ad vehicle B, but it is very possible this is purely a dynamic of the characteristics of the metrics themselves, not the efficacy of the vehicle.

It’s our belief that inconsistent metrics are false metrics, and all metrics on the web are inconsistent. Sure, we’re happy to track everything. We’re happy to tie into whatever tracking packages you already have. We’re happy to trot up to your clients with you and say “this campaign received 1.2 million unique page hits and blah blah blah.” We’ll do what it takes to get the job done. But in the end, we’re only doing it because we know, in our hearts, that the campaign is a good idea, and we want to help you. If you are metrics obsessed to the point where this paragraph upset you, we are probably not the right people for the job.

In the meantime, we do what we can to push the limits of the world of online metrics. We work on software that measures things that haven’t been measured yet. We offer insights to other metrics companies. We sit on panels and committees. We are dabbling even in startups. We believe there’s a long way to go with metrics, and we try and push it when we can. After all, analytics are definitely part of Marketing R&D.