Engagement on a Facebook post is not the same thing as engagement with an infographic. Lastly, and to make things more complex, the same metrics may have different meanings across platforms. Beyond all of this, Keane noted, some terms are poorly defined or outright misnomers and create additional confusion instead of providing clarity. Other metrics, such as scroll depth and click-through rate, “deliver highly important information but need to be paired with additional data to provide context.” The most popular vanity metric-impressions-tells you almost nothing about whether or not someone took the time to read or view your content. “The most popular vanity metric-impressions-tells you almost nothing about whether or not someone took the time to read or view your content.” Other metrics, Keane explained, such as time on site and bounce rate, are informative but their definition varies from platform to platform. “There are a wide variety of metrics out there, and while some are meaningful, others are more for vanity,” said Allyson Keane, Director of Analytics at Group SJR. As for this past year, “In scale, the market is approximately the same, while the momentum behind multi-vendor marketing technology seems to be growing,” Brinker said when we checked in with him in early January 2016. A recent “supergraphic” by Scott Brinker from mapping the landscape of marketing technology today, puts the confusion into perspective, and gives an at-a-glance visual sense of the vast, siloed, and ultimately confusing range of resources out there: Brinker says that as of January 2015, there were 1,876 vendors represented across 43 categories, an increase from 947 in January 2014.

With the vast number of tools and resources available for understanding data today, it seems we’re far from the mutual understanding required in order to define consistent measures of success. But just as Babel’s builders were condemned to speak different languages, communications experts are often speaking in different tongues when it comes to data. One story in particular comes to mind: Just as Old Testament wanderers set out to build the Tower of Babel as a symbol of their unity, marketing and communications pros have aspirations of reaching heavenly enlightenment about what all the data means and what we can learn from it. Call it a flood, a tsunami, or a perfect storm, but the amount of big data available today is reaching biblical proportions.

Picture of tower of babel today