Remember when you had to wait for a report to know if your ad worked?

I was at a small meetup in Austin maybe 8 years back. This older guy, Mark, ran a local shop. He showed me his one notebook where he wrote down every single sale that came from his newspaper ad. He said, 'If I don't see it in this book by Friday, I know the ad failed.' Now I just stare at a live dashboard all day. It's wild. You get numbers for everything instantly. But sometimes I miss that simple check. It made you really think about your message. Does anyone else feel like all this data makes things more complicated, not easier?

3 comments

3 Comments

dakota_nelson431mo ago

Read an article about this called "data rich, insight poor." All the live numbers can drown out the simple story of what's actually working. That jar of marbles told a clearer story than most of my graphs do now.

margaret3041mo ago

Set up a single weekly report that only shows three numbers. I do this for my own stuff now. I only look at new leads, cost per lead, and total sales. I made a simple sheet that pulls the data in automatically, but I only check it on Fridays. It forces me to wait and stops me from tweaking things every hour based on some random dip. The noise goes away and you see the real trend.

xena_fox391mo ago

My uncle used to run a car wash and tracked his radio ads by asking "how'd you hear about us?" He kept a jar of marbles, one for each customer who said the ad. A full jar meant it was working. The dashboard on my phone now gives me a hundred stats before lunch, but that jar was way easier to understand.