Marketers Are Hooked on Bad Data
Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)
Modern marketing is drowning in metrics—click rates, impressions, ROAS, and endless KPIs—but most of it is meaningless. Ad blockers make website tracking unreliable, email open rates don't reflect real opens, and ad platforms like Facebook give wrong data. Even when marketers know how data is collected, they often lack the technical skills to analyze it properly. The author argues that this addiction to bad data stems from a need to justify budgets and jobs, but it's not how brands are truly built.
We're addicted to bad data.
- pandog
A lot of the time you are running experiments and seeing how the data changes, not looking at the data in a vacuum.
Many of the example critiques here don't apply so much when looking at the changes in data:
- if I got 50% more hits on my site this week vs last week, that's meaningful despite 36% of people blocking ads
- if my open rate doubled when I changed my email subject, also meaningful
The other examples are hard to pick holes in as they simply say "Z is a lie", but I can be looking at multiple data sources to decide how much of a lie Z is.
- hermitcrab
The average time on site and bounce rates I have got from advertising my software inside ChatGPT and Reddit are so terrible that I can only assume that most of the clicks I am paying for are fraudulent, although it is not clear who is doing the fraud.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2026/08/13/my-experience-buyi...
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
- hackthemack
This has been known a long time. Freakanomics did a two part podcast on does advertising actually work. It is long but well worth a listen if you want to hear some science about advertising.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
The second part goes into internet advertising.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
There are transcripts of the episodes on the page if you want to read instead of listen.