Comparing What Worked

Comparing Outliers

People like me are avid analyzers of what worked and what didn’t work.

When we need to show metrics quickly, it’s easy to compare two incomparable things. It’s easy to look at the reach of a post or open rate to say this did better than that.

However, when we take the time to truly ruminate on what worked and what didn’t, we’ll often find that you can’t compare the two. They are both outliers and outliers on two sides of a spectrum are very (very!) rarely comparable.

Outliers are subjective, but, likewise, cogently telling.

When you discover a pin with a muffin quote does significantly better than all pins and a horizontal pin of a muffin recipe does the worst of all – it’s easy to say one works and one doesn’t.

The tougher question to answer is why didn’t one work for who we wanted it to and who truly did the other one work for. You may discover that it’s quote lovers, not muffin lovers who engaged with your muffin quote. So, are muffin quotes really working if you sell muffins?

We need to shift our comparisons from what works and what doesn’t to providing meaning behind each, separately.

This goes for more than pins on Pinterst. This goes for the story you’re telling your customers. This goes for the way you ship your art. This goes for the meetings you walk out of and think “that was the best  meeting ever.” Why?

 

Stay Positive & You’ll Find People Care More About The Why Than The What

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Garth Beyer
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