Dear channel report,
Thank you for the colours. The colours are lovely.
I'm writing about the bit where you announce that paid search won and organic search lost, as though the customer arrived at the website wearing one team's scarf.
I have questions.
Did both groups land on the same page? Was one looking for the brand while the other was trying to understand an unfamiliar service? Did the service change halfway through the month? Did your cheerful little conversion count mean the same action in both cases?
I know. This is tedious. A trophy would be easier.
But when one group arrives at a product page ready to order and another arrives at a guide asking whether the product suits their situation, a raw comparison tells us about more than the channel.
It might tell us the guide needs a clearer next step. It might tell us the product page answers a different question. It might tell us nothing useful until we separate those visits a bit.
What it does not automatically tell us is that one department is brilliant and the other should sit in the corner.
This territorial stuff drives me mad. Someone hears that a customer first found a guide, later searched the brand and finally sent an enquiry. Suddenly we're arguing about who owns the customer.
Nobody owns the customer. They own a browser and, with any luck, the freedom to close it.
I would much rather ask which part of that journey helped and which part got in the way. Yes, we still have to decide where effort and budget go. No, adding context doesn't make every decision impossible.
Start with the page and the visitor's task. Keep comparable groups together where you can. Admit when you can't. If a form changed, put that in the report instead of making the next person discover it like a plot twist.
I remain grateful for your neatly aligned columns. I would be more grateful if we stopped using them to stage a departmental pissing contest.
Warm regards,
A person who would quite like the website to work.
A thought worth keeping?
