Marketing Measurement
Data Overload: When Marketers Measure Everything But Learn Nothing
By Frankline Kibuacha
Walk into any modern marketing department today, and you’ ll find what looks like the cockpit of an airplane. Screens glow with dashboards, KPIs, heatmaps, sentiment trackers, and funnel visualizations. Every click is measured, every eyeball counted, every like tallied. At first glance, it appears to be control. A sense that, with this much data, nothing could possibly go wrong.
But ask the team a simple question:“ What’ s the biggest consumer frustration with your product right now?” More often than not, the room falls silent. Eyes dart back to the dashboards. Someone points out that traffic has increased by 20 %. Another proudly notes that the conversion rate is“ within industry standards.” Yet no one seems able to answer the question.
That’ s the paradox of modern marketing. Brands have never had more data at their fingertips, but in many cases, they’ ve never been further from understanding their consumers.
The Illusion of Knowing Data abundance creates an illusion of certainty. Dashboards are comforting in that they make you feel like you’ re on top of things. But numbers can hide as much as they reveal.
Consider a scenario in Kenya’ s banking sector. Imagine a mid-sized bank launching a campaign offering free M-Pesa deposits and transfers. On the surface, it looks brilliant. Dashboards would light up with new account openings. Transaction volumes would surge. Team meetings would be a lot easier. The campaign reports would be glowing green- proof, it seems, that the strategy is paying off.
But beneath those numbers lies a different reality. Many of these new customers are flocking in for the freebie, not for the bank. They enjoy the promotion while it lasts, but once fees return, they quietly stop using their accounts and drift back to the institutions they’ ve always trusted. The dashboards won’ t capture this- to the numbers, these were“ acquired customers” but to the business, they were temporary visitors.
This is the danger of mistaking short-term activity for long-term traction. Metrics can tell you that something happened, but
The shift from data-rich to insight-driven is not about rejecting metrics. It’ s about elevating them. It’ s about transforming numbers into knowledge, and knowledge into strategy. Because in the end, the question is not“ How much data do you have?” It’ s“ What are you doing with it?”
they don’ t always tell you if it mattered. In this case, the campaign would generate traffic, not trust. Volume, not value.
And this isn’ t just a local risk. In the United States, Wells Fargo faced a major scandal when employees, under pressure to hit aggressive sales targets, opened millions of fake accounts without customer consent. For years, the numbers showed strong growth in account openings, a key KPI. However, those“ wins” masked deep-seated consumer mistrust that eventually erupted into one of the biggest reputational crises in banking history.
The lesson here is that tracking uptake without context is like monitoring the speed of a car without noticing it’ s veering off the road. You might be moving fast, but in the wrong direction.
Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics
Not all data is created equal. Marketers know this in theory, but in practice, vanity metrics still dominate too many boardroom conversations. Likes. Impressions. Reach. Website traffic. They look good in reports, but they don’ t keep the lights on.
I learned this lesson early in my career, probably because of my finance background. Numbers, to me, always have to tie back to value. If they don’ t connect to the bottom line, they are decoration. That’ s why my mantra in digital marketing has always been: likes and impressions don’ t put food on the table.
This came into sharp focus when I was marketing for SMEs. These were business owners who had little money to spend on marketing. They didn’ t care about vanity- they wanted results. Their question was always the same:“ How many quality leads
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