The Metrics Aren’t Wrong. They’re Incomplete.
The Metrics Aren’t Wrong. They’re Incomplete.
Marketing has never had more data.
We can see who opened an email, who clicked an ad, who visited a website, what they looked at, how long they stayed, and whether they ultimately converted.
And because we can measure all of those things, we've gotten very good at optimizing around them.
But there’s a problem. The things that are easiest to measure aren't always the things that matter most.
A customer can see an email, never click it, and walk into a store later that afternoon. Someone can discover a brand through a paid campaign, visit its website without buying, and make a purchase in person three days later. A store associate can spend twenty minutes helping someone find the right product and meaningfully change whether that customer buys.
All of those interactions created value. Our dashboards may tell a very different story.
What Happens After the Click?
On the first episode of the Phygital Marketing Podcast, I sat down with longtime retail and digital commerce leader Mark Friedman to talk about the relationship between physical and digital marketing.
One of the most interesting points from our conversation was also one of the simplest: digital marketing doesn't only drive digital behavior.
A brand might spend money on paid media, email, or SMS and measure the success of that investment based on clicks and online conversions. But customers don't experience brands in channels.
An email can remind someone about a brand without ever getting opened. A digital ad can create enough interest for someone to visit a store instead of a website. A text can influence a purchase that happens at a register.
Mark has even seen businesses pull back on email because customers appeared unengaged, only to see store traffic suffer as a result. The email was working. The measurement just wasn't capturing all of the ways it was working.
A Good Metric Can Still Tell the Wrong Story
This doesn't mean metrics like click-through rate, ROAS, or conversion rate aren't valuable. They are. The problem comes when we ask a single metric to explain more than it actually can.
Take conversion rate. If a brand is investing heavily in awareness and bringing a much larger audience into the top of its funnel, its conversion rate may fall. That could signal a problem. Or it could mean the brand is successfully reaching thousands of new people who aren't ready to buy yet.
Those are two very different stories hiding behind the same number. The right question isn't simply, "Did conversion rate go up or down?" It's, "Why?" What changed about the traffic? Where did those customers come from? What happened before they arrived? What happened afterward? Did their behavior continue somewhere else?
Without that context, optimization can become surprisingly counterproductive.
- A marketer sees declining email engagement and sends fewer emails.
- A retailer sees high labor costs and reduces store staff.
- A team sees a lower conversion rate and pulls back on awareness spend.
Each decision might make a metric look better while making the actual customer experience worse.
Physical Retail Makes the Blind Spots Bigger
These gaps become especially obvious in stores. Online, nearly every action leaves a trail. In physical retail, many of the most meaningful moments still don't.
A customer walks through the door. They browse. They pick something up. They ask an associate a question. They learn something about a product. Maybe they buy. Maybe they don't. Then they leave.
For most brands, much of that journey is still invisible. That creates a strange imbalance.
Brands can debate whether an email subject line moved click-through rate by a fraction of a percentage point while knowing very little about the people spending twenty minutes inside their stores.
And when something can't be connected to a customer, it becomes much harder to understand its value.
Collecting Data Isn't the Same as Knowing Your Customer
Of course, plenty of brands already have customer data. That doesn't necessarily solve the problem either.
Mark shared the example of a supermarket his family has shopped at for decades. The store has a loyalty program and years of purchase history, but little of that information seems to translate into a better relationship. No recognition that a longtime customer hasn't visited recently. No acknowledgment that their spending habits have changed. No particularly useful outreach based on what the brand already knows.
The data exists. The relationship hasn't changed. That's an important distinction.
The goal of customer data shouldn't be to simply know more about people. It should be to make the next interaction better.
If a customer tells you what they like, remember it. If they regularly visit one location, recognize that. If they haven't been back in a while, give them a reason to return. If they walked into a store but didn't purchase, don't assume the interaction had no value.
Data becomes useful when it creates continuity.
The Best Customer Experience Might Be Both Human and Measurable
There's another side to all of this. As brands get better at measurement, they can't optimize away the parts of physical retail that make it valuable in the first place.
Mark repeatedly came back to the human element of stores. A knowledgeable associate can answer the question a product page can't. They can understand the nuance behind what someone is looking for. They can ask a follow-up question, make a recommendation, or simply make someone feel taken care of.
That experience is difficult to recreate online. It can also be difficult to quantify. But difficult to measure doesn't mean unimportant. In fact, better measurement should make it easier to invest in those experiences, not easier to eliminate them.
If brands can understand who is visiting, what happens during those visits, and what customers do afterward, the impact of the physical experience becomes much easier to see. Store teams don't have to compete with digital teams for credit. Marketing doesn't have to guess whether an online campaign influenced offline behavior. And physical retail stops looking like a black box.
The Next Era of Marketing Needs More Context, Not Just More Data
For years, marketers have been trying to collect more data. The next opportunity is making the data we already have more connected. Digital behavior shouldn't stop at the store entrance. An in-store visit shouldn't disappear when someone walks out. A conversation with an associate shouldn't exist completely separately from the customer's digital relationship with the brand. And a customer's history shouldn't reset depending on where they happen to interact with you.
This is the gap Sotto is built to close.
By connecting real-world identity and engagement to an ongoing digital relationship, brands can begin to understand customers across the entire journey, not just the pieces that happen to be easiest to track. That means recognizing who shows up in person, learning from those interactions, and continuing the conversation after they leave.
Because the goal isn't to measure more for the sake of measuring more. It's to understand what your customers are actually doing. And sometimes, the most important thing happening isn't the thing your dashboard is currently counting.