Having data is great, but you have to know to use it

Against the backdrop of a tight economy and shrinking budgets, the most successful agencies and marketers will be those who know how to use data to track, measure and optimise brands’ return on investment from marketing.

With the rise of digital marketing, marketers now have a wealth of data at their fingertips that they can analyse to uncover trends so that they can better understand marketing and advertising performance, as well as gain insight into customer behaviour that they can use to shape their strategies.

Today, data makes the world go around, especially on the Web, where it is easy to gather it. Today, we’re seeing a massive focus on return on investment and business value, which means that brands are asking for more accountability from their agencies and marketing departments. They want measurable results from their spending.

People in the marketing game have always craved accurate information about how successful their marketing and advertising campaigns are as well as insight into how they could optimise performance. But measuring performance in traditional media was always imprecise and challenging because of a lack of hard, objective data.

This picture has changed, thanks to the web. Customers and prospects can be tracked via cookies and other mechanisms so that brands can see how they engage with display ads, search, social media, corporate Web properties, and more. Every single action taken online is recorded, which means there is an incredible wealth of data available to marketers to help them understand when, where, how and even why people react to their marketing campaigns.

This means that organisations can potentially see customers’ pathway to conversion from exposure to the brand right up to customer acquisition. This information can help them optimise the customer experience at various points in the funnel and to understand which channels are performing the best for them.

For example, they can track whether customers later search for the brand after seeing an online display ad. Or they can see where a consumer falls off in the purchase process after visiting an ecommerce site after clicking on a banner and initiating a purchase.

The real skill is processing data efficiently, visualising it, communicating it to all stakeholders, and then gleaning insights from it that can be applied to the business strategy. Successful marketing professionals will be able to use analytics tools to turn raw data into insights that can be applied to the business strategy in a practical and immediate manner.

The key to working with data is to set out with a clear idea of which objectives, goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) you wish to track. For example, an objective might be to increase sales of a product, grow brand awareness or increase website traffic.

This objective should be mapped onto a goal for the website or campaign in terms of the action the brand desires from the user. For example, such a goal might be to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter.

Then, you can use a range of KPIs to understand whether your goals and objectives are being met. If the objective is to increase website traffic, you may look at the number of website visitors, the percentage of new visitors, and how long users stay on the site.

There are some intangible goals in digital marketing that are hard to measure objectively – one example is the often-used buzzword ‘engagement’. You should translate these into measurable metrics such as social media shares or dwell times to provide insight.

Attribution – deciding which channels helped to convert a customer – can also be difficult. If the consumer saw an ad but converted following a search, should you attribute a conversion to the last click or trace it back to the consumer’s first exposure? Knowing how to model attribution correctly is key to making wise digital media investments.

What matters is not the absolutes of the numbers, but the trends they show. Increasingly, marketers need to know how to analyse and present data so that they can create more efficient and effective marketing campaigns, and a healthier bottom line.

Data isn’t just about benchmarking performance, but also about shaping content. Yet we should not become so obsessed with data that they allow it to stifle creativity and innovation in their campaign executions. New ideas should be encouraged and tested — the measurement can come later.