Do you add apples and oranges together? If you are lucky, you’ll get a bowl of fruit salad. 🍓🍈🍒🍑🍍🥝
But most of the time, you’ll just mess up your data.
This happens a lot in digital marketing analytics when marketers mix data from different sources.
For example:
– AdWords data when reporting AdWords conversions
– Facebook data when reporting Facebook conversions
– Google Analytics for other conversions.
(If you want to, you can add a programmatic platform and marketing automation to this mix.)
This data will never match. In fact, mixing the data from different sources will just create duplicate conversions in your calculations.
Consider this path of user interactions with your site:
– day 1: User clicks an AdWords ad
– day 2: User sees a Facebook ad
– day 3: User clicks an organic Google result and buys
AdWords reports one conversion, Facebook reports one conversion and Google Analytics one conversion for organic search. Add these together and you have three conversions and a CEO who will never again trust your data.
Do this instead:
Measure all conversions using the same tool (Google Analytics, for example). This will not be “the truth”, but it is much more accurate than mixing data from different sources.
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