Marketers have no shortage of metrics on their dashboards, but they are still often flying blind. Marketing visibility can be simultaneously clear and opaque. To paraphrase Coleridge, the state of marketing is “metrics, metrics everywhere, and not sure what to think.”

OverstateGate brought a colorful rise out of Branding Professor Mark Ritson:

“This little debacle once again confirms that nobody actually knows what the fuck is going on with digital media. Not media agencies, not big-spending clients and not armchair digital strategists. From the shadowy box of turds and spiders that is programmatic to the increasingly complex and deluded world of digital views, the idea that digital marketing is more analytical and attributable than other media is clearly horse shit. Sure, it has more numbers and many more metrics but that does not make it more accountable, it makes it less so.”

In general, marketers can’t always take metrics at face value. We have to get savvier and more sophisticated at questioning the numbers we use. We have to beware of faux metrics and fuzzy math....

Via Jeff Domansky, Os Ishmael

Facebook has tweaked its New Feed algorithm many, many times in its attempt to keep the posts you see relevant, but the change it’s rolling out today may be the most important one yet: Facebook is vowing to kill clickbait.

Facebook has tweaked its New Feed algorithm many, many times in its attempt to keep the posts you see relevant, but the change it’s rolling out today may be the most important one yet: Facebook is vowing to kill clickbait.

It’s a potentially huge move, and one that makes journalism better for almost everyone involved.

How it works

Now Facebook is filtering out clickbait much like Gmail hides spam. It’s detecting specific words, structures, and styles in titles which “intentionally leave out crucial information, forcing people to click to find the answer.”

Here are some Facebook-provided samples of titles you will be seeing a lot less of:

“When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”

“He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”

“The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.”...

Via Jeff Domansky, Dejan Nikolic