The Harvard Business Review has a great article, Advertising Analytics 2.0 in their March edition where they discuss marketers common habit of measuring performance of each channel as if they worked independently of each other. They use of the metaphor of swim lanes and suggest how marketers need to think in terms of cross channel path-to-purchase and start to pay attention to how certain channels give an “assist” in terms of influencing a consumer to buy.
I continually see companies, both big and small, continue to view their marketing and ad campaigns through a narrow lens and fixate on channel which lead to a direct sale. There’s a lot of consternation about the ROI of social media sites but it helps to understand the support role these channels play in getting a customer to convert. The graphic by HBR demonstrates this well:
