Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible. That is possible because people tested countless times what works, what didn't, what is the most efficient path to a rewarding UX, and so on.
Yes, there are a ton of garbage lazy marketers in the world. Saying that marketing shouldn't exist would immediately render every refined UX you have navigated, purchased from, and or loyally stream content from.
Throwing out the good because of the bad is too far of a reach IMO. Anywho, that's just little old me and my opinion doesn't mean much.
Just accruing swaths of data doesn’t help, you need to interpret it correctly. I think qualitative data will bring you a long way. Once you need to do A/B testing, you can also do it privacy friendly.
If you market your product and run a campaign? Why not offer discount codes or something to figure out how you got them.
Tracking what button or page layout works better from a conversion perspective is not a privacy issue. It's a user experience benefit.
Having a SaaS business and not understanding the exact user funnel, conversion, abandonment, etc. will directly translate into a loss of your job and/or the failure of your business.
This isn't about personal preference which you have every right to. This is about building a business, which is why we're all here, and understanding how to successfully delight our customers.
Funny; those kinds of sites are my least favorite. All those colors and buttons are an information overload, and the animations make my laptop fans spin like crazy. Not everyone bought their computer under a decade ago.
Please, blue links and black text aren't evil. We need to make interfaces functional and stop rather than continuously A/B test them to maximize addictiveness ("engagement").
"Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible."
Regardless of the site experience that you prefer, I can assure you that thought, testing, and iterations have occurred to deliver the experience that you personally prefer.
Furthermore, I don't want hyper-optimized experiences. These experienced tend to be addictive, whether intended or not. Using an interface shouldn't feel "magical", it should work. I know that you weren't implying addictiveness or engagement, yet these values are (consciously or unconsciously) prevalent enough in the field that they've lowered my level of trust in analytics-driven iteration. Other responses in this thread should also show that I'm far from the only one who feels this way. Earning back broken trust in these situations typically requires going above and beyond past expectations.
User research is research, and should require informed consent held to the same standards of consent as actual research. In any human research, participation should be opt-in. Participants should be given complete information about analytics and how they will be used (with the option to see source code), own their data, be able to revoke their data, and see conclusions of the studies in a format they can understand. Any questions they have should be responded to before and after they opt-in. This shouldn't be buried in a confusing privacy policy but provided upfront, in a language they can speak. People frequently learn interfaces in languages that are foreign to them, but reading details of user research is a different story: you might need a translator. Otherwise, your sample will be even more heavily biased.
This is a lot of work, and might make analytics more trouble than they're worth.
Nothing they say is trustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest
Everyone who says anything has that same conflict of interest. You do, I do, marketers do, salespeople do, engineers do, politicians do, scientists do. Completely dismissing value of an entire profession based upon self interest doesn't have a limiting principle.
Marketing, even if you naively limit the term to just cover advertising, is a rich and useful function of capitalism and society in general. The key to dealing with it is in protecting basic freedoms like a right to privacy.
I do because in 99% of cases it's a deliberate waste of my time and attention.
> Everyone who says anything has that same conflict of interest.
I don't think so. The information I receive from friends and peers is far more trustworthy. With marketing, I get selective truths at best.
Lots and lots of people on this site admit to adding "reddit" to their searches when looking for product reviews. Why? Because they don't trust marketers. We want real information from real people with real experiences, not some paid-for narrative. We especially want to know the risks, the negatives and the cons, precisely the kind of information marketers want to bury.
Since ads need to be conspecious by law, I don't see a conflict of interest. We know this is a carefully crafted story of the person who has stakes in the product or service.
I don't. I believe marketers should have exactly zero ways to measure the effectiveness of their mind hacking efforts. Any data they try and collect should have negative value by virtue of being completely randomized by the browser.
Actually I believe marketers shouldn't even exist. Nothing they say is trustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The internet would be much better off without these constant attempts to subvert it for their purposes.