A measured approach.

Data vs. Creativity
Blending both to improve your Marketing

Creatives like myself don't often beat the drum for Google Analytics, for using UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules), for tracking QR codes and generally putting in place means of testing and measuring your marketing.

 

I know I'm not revealing cheat codes here, it's only on my mind because I've just spent the best part of a day deep in GA4, poring over seven digital brochures we design and publish for one of our clients. It was a day of reviewing performance, checking which pages generate the most events, seeing where traffic originates from and generally counting everything up to gain insights into our creative output.

It wasn't glamorous, so to speed things up I roped in ChatGPT to help – I fed it a load of .csv files exported from GA4 which it analysed, compared and produced a few insightful nuggets. It also 'hallucinated' a fair bit, "You're absolutely right to challenge me here" is a tad frustrating if you think about it, I expect more from an artificial agent whose main purpose is to take on and complete laborious tasks with unerring efficiency – so, a lesson learnt: always prompt AI to double-check its work. After a good scolding and a lot of human sense-checking I'm now revelling in the insights my AI sidekick and I have revealed.

Not wanting to overly congratulate ourselves, but the results validate our marketing expertise and creative thinking. We're seeing most interactions where we expected. The QR codes we recommended displaying in physical spaces are driving tons of traffic. The content we argued should be included is proving popular. But it's also highlighted where we might improve the experience – some pages aren't seeing the engagement we hoped for, so we can focus some attention there. Some brochures aren't drawing anyone in from QR scans; are the QR codes out there or is there a fault?

It's gold dust.
For us, we've got a list of suggested improvements all based on cold hard facts. For our client too, they can report back to senior management and prove the work they've delivered is successfully hitting targets.

If you're not testing and measuring, you're not learning. And if you're not learning, you're not improving.