A professor at MIT was recently telling me about working with elementary school kids in an art and sculpture studio. He found it fascinating that very young kids -- up to about the 2nd or 3rd grade -- gravitated to making highly imaginative 3D sculptures. But by a couple grades later, the kids were drawn more naturally towards drawing and painting, two-dimensional renderings.
His observation was that we are trained and conditioned to think in two dimensions. Graphs have an X and a Y axis, and we're comfortable with that. But start talking about three-dimensional analyses, and we quickly feel uncomfortable. Our brains try to simplify the problem to two dimensions, where we have learned to intuitively detect patterns.
How does this relate to post-click marketing?
Post-click marketing is at the intersection of three things: (1) the traffic sources of banner ads, paid search keywords, and e-mail marketing messages where clicks originate, (2) the different types of people who click on them, known as your audience segments, and (3) the post-click "landing experiences" that you present.
This is a three-dimensional challenge to solve. You want to find the optimal combinations of traffic sources, audience segments, and landing experiences -- which of those lead to the highest quality conversions at the lowest cost. If you only look at this problem in two dimensions, you're leaving a lot on the table.
So how do you shift into three-dimensional post-click thinking?
1. Consciously acknowledge that it is a three-dimensional image that you want to picture in your brain. Actively remind yourself about each of the three dimensions: traffic sources, audience segments, and paths.
2. Make sure that you're collecting the data you need to see what's happening in each of these three dimensions of your post-click marketing campaigns.
3. Plug the data into charts and graphs that let you visualize three different things happening at the same time: a bar chart with multiple series, maybe a bubble chart, or a surface graph that shows peaks and valleys along a three-dimensional terrain. What patterns emerge?
4. Identify "hot spots" that show interesting activity and trace their origin on each of the three axes: where did those respondents come from, which segment did they belong to, and what landing path did you present to them? How does this relate to other hot spots versus combinations that are underperforming?
5. Savor the beauty and power of a three-dimensional model and play with it -- think of it as your own online marketing sculpture studio -- to come up with ideas for new post-click marketing experiments that can further improve your ROI.
-Scott Brinker
