What overarching feeling do I get as I look back at a year of new data streams, new and improved data tools, more eMetrics Summit presentations and an avalanche of articles, blogs, books and tweets? I feel the world of marketing analytics is maturing nicely.
New data streams require new hydro-tech to help us channel the flow. The never-before-seen quantity of data that was web analytics has been dwarfed by social media and mobile. We desperately needed new ways to manipulate that overwhelming expanse of information and Map-Reduce/Hadoop/Big Data technology showed up just in time.
Armed with the ability to computationally cogitate colossal quantities of facts and figures, we now have renewed hope for merging the wide variety of data types. This has given way to the buzz-word-de-jour: Attribution.
A funny thing happened on the way to attribution: we met our marketing analytics forefathers coming down the road from the other direction.
Attribution is the bottom-up amalgamation of individuals’ activities to determine which marketing promotions are contributing how much to each conversion. We now have so much data about each individual’s behaviors that we can start to draw a line from awareness and sentiment through intent and consideration to comparison and decision.
Coming from the other direction, we see the media and marketing mix modeling types who have been playing the same game from the top down for several decades. They have appraised total spend across multiple channels against business outcomes.
Both measurement modes are trying to answer the ultimate question: How do I get more bang for my marketing buck? Which half of my advertising dollar is being wasted?
What maturation is it then, that I see on the horizon? I’m coming across more people who are managing large amounts of marketing budget with mix modeling, managing the optimization of campaigns and landing pages and offers-on-the-fly with attribution models, and who are equally happy using one technique to inform decisions about the other.
Rather than two philosophical combatants misunderstanding and mistrusting each other, I see them sharing insights and learning from each other. The mix modeling people are finding the online behavior and sentiment data useful and the attribution people are finding an excellent attitude toward fuzzy, probabilistic and predictive mathematics.
With both teams working together, we further the influence of our industry and increase the possibilities for individual career enhancement.
By golly, we’re growing up.
Jim Sterne
Chair, Digital Analytics Association