Why this volume exists
Marketing is the delivery system. Messaging is what gets delivered. Impressions, reach, engagement and sessions all measure the delivery system. Not one of them tells you whether what arrived meant anything to the person who received it. That distinction is the whole volume.
The case it opens with
An international business coach watched followers, engagement and traffic rise for years. The analytics were installed correctly and the figures were accurate. The business was not selling, and nobody inside had ever suspected anything, because every number on the dashboard was going the right way.
Where the evidence went against me
The uncomfortable finding is that a falling number starts an investigation and a rising one never does. When a business aims its marketing at a cheaper tier than its product, the standard numbers do not merely fail to inform. They rise as it drifts further from its buyer. I also ran two attribution models across identical data and found an optimum that was the reverse of both, which is not a comfortable thing to publish when clients are paying for attribution work.
What was cut
Cut from the final text: several tidy heuristics about channel mix that did not survive contact with the eBay experiment on attributed conversions. The book says plainly what that experiment showed about a large share of conversions that were never worth what was paid for them.
Where to read it
Principles of Practice, Volume III: Marketing Operations. Five Seconds, and the Numbers That Rise as You Miss Published by the National Board of Operations Professionals. The publisher page for this volume carries the full description and how it maps to the standard.
Operating notes and
standards drafts
No cadence promises, only when there is something worth sending.