New York Magazine shared an interesting article on the fake internet. The article has much deeper aims than just implications for marketing, but it’s a worthwhile reminder that much of what we marketers obsessively track isn’t all that close to reality.
Much of the web’s traffic is fake. Over half, if this report is to believed. This suggests that many of the “users” we track are fake by extension. Smart marketers know this, and view their web metrics with a healthy grain of salt, considering them leading indicators, not hard metrics. Perhaps a more elegant solution is one where the organizations automatically deflate metrics to account for bot traffic. Of course, the challenge with this approach is figuring out which half of your data is full of bots.
The silver lining about all this fake data is that it’s a reminder to look downstream at metrics that are harder to fake – those where money changes hands. This of course is where we marketers should be focusing more of our attention anyways. No good can come of sales-marketing alignment when the former is talking about revenue and pipeline, and the latter is still talking clicks and opens.