The Marketing department’s new digital advertising program doubled traffic to the company website. Great news — except that there was no corresponding bump in sales revenue. Once that fact became clear, the CEO asked the CIO to get involved.

This all happened at a company I have worked with, but it’s not all that unusual. The truth is that there are many ways that online numbers can be inflated that have nothing to do with real people looking at actual ads or content. In this case, Marketing had tried to generate more website traffic without IT’s advice. Now that the CEO has put the CIO on the case, Marketing may well learn that IT has some valuable insights into how digital marketing can be abused.

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