The McKinsey Quarterly has published a McKinsey Global Survey - How Companies are Marketing Online - you can read the whole article here.

I found one table particularly informative - Exhibit six on this page of the report.

What interested me was the difference between 'users' and 'non-users' of online marketing - ie the marketers who have jumped in the deep end, and the marketers still standing on the side of the pool. You'd expect that the users would have a realistic expectation based upon experience, and the non-users would still working on assumptions and expectations.

The differences show up in two main areas.

52% of users regard insufficient metrics to measure impact as a barrier, compared to only 39% of non-users - this is notable because measurability is always touted as such a strength for online marketing. (I'd interprete this as possibly meaning, not 'insufficient' metrics because pretty much any online activity can generate an ocean of datapoints, but rather, never quite the metrics you really want to see).

18% of users regard insufficient capabilities of their agencies as a barrier, compared to only 9% of non-users - which sort of implies that those non-users are heading for a corrective experience in terms of their agency's actual capabilities, rather than their promised capabilities.

The smaller divergences on availability of inventory (something McKinsey has flagged before), brand risk and labour intensivity of online marketing, also point to the difference between the promise and the experience.

 Tags: online marketing, measurement, analysis, McKinsey