We love Santa. The idea of a chubby old man shimmying down a chimney to bring toys to little girls and boys is awesome.

Santa is the freaking man.

He has flying reindeer, defies laws of space and time on Christmas Eve, and still maintains his rotund figure despite constant work-related stress. Additionally Santa possesses some sort of omniscience that allows him to determine the 'niceness' or 'naughtiness' of every living child. He also ages remarkably well and is able to coax the world's elf population to maintain a scalable enterprise without, apparently, much of a profit.

All of these things--and a host of others--make Santa really cool. Santa does all of this while maintaining a legendary secrecy. He is accountable to know one. Santa is a law unto himself.

It has come to my attention, however, that Santa hates call tracking.

Why?

Well, call tracking is about visibility. It is about allowing marketers to see into their performance. It is about holding marketing accountable and proving ROI. Call tracking is about determining if your marketing is actually making you money (or just wasting it).

Santa despises all these things. His so-called 'workshop' operation doesn't care about profits or losses. Nor does it care about ROI.

Santa only cares about creating toys for the world's children. Any tool that holds him accountable for his marketing spend is something that Santa does NOT support.

Are these appearances in malls actually useful marketing for Santa? Do they generate any new business for him? What about his occasional appearances in jewelry, Coca-Cola, or car commercials? Do any of these costly marketing efforts produce a Return-On-Investment?

Santa doesn't want to find out the answer to these potentially damning questions.

He wants the mall visits and the commercials to continue. He's treated like royalty when he makes these visits. Have you seen his gigantic throne at the mall? He gets free food and Mrs. Claus gets free swag. The attention and the rockstar treatment is addictive. Santa simply doesn't want to know if all of this so-called marketing is actually working.

He hates call tracking.

So, as much as we love Santa, we have to confess that we don't have much in common. We want to track the effectiveness of our marketing. We demand that every marketing tactic is measurable and quantifable with real data and real analytics. We don't engage in costly marketing activities and simply hope they work. We measure, optimize and improve.

Our clients don't have anything in common with Santa either. Sure they enjoy the jolly old elf as much as anyone, but when it comes to measuring marketing performance and proving ROI, our clients simply disagree with Santa. They don't understand his aversion to metrics.

Santa we love you but, you need to move into the new age of analytics. Ditch the 'brand and hope' strategy. Let's try to some real performance and metric based marketing.

Santa, stop hating. Please use call tracking to find out who has been naughty and nice. Don't play Scrooge and do read Our Secrets to Tracking Calls for Fun and Profit  (To conform with FTC regulations, Santa Claus did not write this post.  McKay Allen of LogMyCalls is responsible and you can contact me below.  Thanks.)

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