Relevance – Hard To Define – Harder To Measure

First, we had data with the internet

Then we had information with Google

Now we have relevance

The real metric that is driving the web, search engines and the personal internet experience is the ability to deliver relevant content to the user – both in terms of advertising and general communication. The challenge is how to measure this metric. Relevance monitoring has at best been fuzzy – as you can see when Facebook and other social media platforms bombard you with their so-called targeted advertising. Exceptionally poor click-rates on Google and Facebook and LinkedIn adverts are showing that unless content is relevant and targeted the message is at best lost and at worst degraded.

The best way to measure relevance is to correlate it to the user engagement based on a multi-channel delivery environment – email, web, social media etc – and then find a way to integrate the feedback from all these sources.

The pertinent information you can glean from this process is:

– Who is finding your communications relevant?
– Who has never read anything you have ever sent them, but is suddenly reading your communications?
– Which of your clients are looking at other products or funds in your portfolio?
– What activity is a complete waste of time?
– What can you do to make communications more relevant?

Simply asking people for feedback is fraught with sampling errors and supposes that people are interested enough in you to give feedback.

So what is the solution?

There are two parts to this:

1. Collect and analyse the data
2. Build internal processes around the data

That’s it in a nutshell, but obviously, there is more detail to this process! Keep following this blog and we will be sharing the results of our research and studies into relevance.