You heard me. It’s average. This magical metric we are using in most of our reports is often useless. Occasionally we forget that the reports and dashboards we are using were made to help us get better decisions, hence we should do our best to use the metrics that will help us improve the way we work.
TL;DR: Use average to start asking questions and breakdown the data. Use metrics that help you create action items.
As a B2B marketer, you see that many deals are different in their components due to; company size, business industry, special requests, and more. Looks like any use of average for deal size can do injustice to everything that’s going on behind the scenes. To avoid this try to get as specific as you can – check every channel’s impact on the $ line and start digging as for what campaign is helping your cause. Keep an eye open for high spending campaigns that do not reflect on the income line for your company.
Of course, that requires some attribution tools to help you make these decisions, but avoiding the use of average in these cases can help you dodge wrong business decisions. For example, if your Google Ads channel looks like it’s having a positive average ROI and income – you can accidentally come up with a decision to raise the budget significantly. Try to analyze each part of the marketing machine and see what are the campaigns and keywords that give you the most value.
One of the most common uses of the average is in salaries. Take this for instance:
Looks simple right? But it’s really hard to get a good sense of what’s going on with this metric alone, it is just the very base of the start of the discussion. According to AverageSalarySurvey at least 57% of the people earn less than ILS 200K a year which puts the median around ILS 180K. Now you can start looking at the differences between Men and women:
Yes. It does show the AVG again but it helps you start the breakdown again and more importantly – Ask questions:
- What are the reasons that women earn less than men?
- In what occupations there’s a big gap? In what there is not?
- In which locations the gap is the largest?
And that’s just the beginning…
After all the harsh words in this blog, I should add this – we do NEED to use average but only as a starting point for the discussion. Average rarely shows us the whole picture, therefore, you should try your best to use metrics that will help you create a clear list of action items. Use your dashboards wisely to help you focus on what can you do to step up your marketing efforts.
Yuval Tessler 