It’s easy for marketers to get obsessed with numbers. Our marketing department reports on numbers like “web visits” and “twitter followers” to show how effective we are being. We must be doing well if thousands of people like our Facebook page, or visit our website. Right?

Not so much. These numbers are nice to report on and make cool looking graphs and pie charts, but they aren’t the pulse of our business. Our business is centered on engagement and loyalty. Our job, both in the marketing department and for our clients, is to create engagement and loyalty and as a natural result, sales-ready leads.

Avinash Kaushik, the digital marketing evangelist for Google presented to the audience of the well-known digital marketing event SES in Toronto. The message was “don’t use stupid metrics”. There’s a great summary of the presentation in BtoB magazine that I wanted to share. It’s a great reminder to all marketers that we cannot be measured by clicks, views, Likes, follows and all of those other words that meant something completely different 15 years ago. Read the full article here.