The Future of Digital Analytics, 'Big Data' and Marketing

Digital Analytics is the new hotness. While ‘big data’, cloud computing, mobile and social still sit on the tip of every blogger’s tongue and title – the concept of digital analytics encompass them all. Digital Analytics is the integration of all your online channels including your website, Twitter, Facebook, display ads, loyalty card, SEO, mobile application, search and so much more, and is the key to unlocking insight about customers (talk about variety, volume and velocity – Doug Laney knows what’s up). Where is all this data born and stored you ask? More often than not, it’s already sitting safely in the cloud.

It wasn’t too long ago that on-premise web analytics was all the rage. Remember when, ‘how many hits did we get?!’ was the most exciting question of the day? People obsessed over their weekly reports counting up page views, click-through rates and bounce metrics. It was all about getting more eyeballs on the page, with little regard as to what the brains behind them were thinking about doing next. Now that we have more data, it’s only natural that marketing departments want to bring in technology to transform that data into information. For example, Quantivo was delivering behavioral analytics in 2008, before most people were even attempting it. Modern marketing has evolved.

To me, web analytics ‘jumped the shark’ the day the Web Analytics Association (WAA) changed their name to the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) earlier this year. This organization, along with others like it, are leading the charge into the unfamiliar cross-hairs between IT and Marketing. If you want to come along for the ride, you better get your facts straight.

First of all – you are not alone.

“71% of CMOs feel unprepared to deal with the data explosion over the next five years. 68% feel unprepared to deal with social media. 65% feel unprepared to deal with the growing number of channel and tech device choices.” – InformationWeek

Secondly – the shift from analog to digital is eminent.

“Almost three-quarters of enterprise decision makers report a shift in budgets from traditional advertising to digital in the past year, according to a March 2012 report from DataXu.” – MarketingCharts

“About one-third say that more than half of their budgets have shifted from traditional to digital marketing, while an additional 23% report between 26% and 50% of their budgets moving to digital”. – MarketingCharts

Third of all – education is essential.

“58% of respondents said they lacked the skills and technology to perform analytics on marketing data, and more than 70% said they aren’t able to leverage the value of customer data.” – WDM Group

“Some 75% of enterprise decision makers polled in a recent survey believe that leveraging data will help their companies dramatically improve their business, yet more than half feel they currently lack the tools to mine true customer insights from the data generated by digital and offline efforts.”” – WDM Group

The best piece of advice I have is this – don’t be afraid to get started. Some of our Fortune 500 clients have come to us with an incredible hypothesis they want to explore, but then realize their entire website is tagged incorrectly. What do we do? We just load it in a day and let them see it for themselves.

We are not strangers to massive data sets and customer analysis, so when the DAA asked us to join a panel on the future of big data we accepted. Our Founder and Chief Technology Officer Paul O’Leary will present on panel, “What’s Next with Big Data,” on August 29 at the Digital Analytics Association San Francisco Symposium: What’s Next? – The Future of Digital Analytics. On the panel, O’Leary will join other experts from leading big data analytics companies, including Splunk and Think Big Analytics, to share perspectives on big data including tips on getting started and what businesses can look forward to with emerging technologies.

During the discussion O’Leary will discuss the three main challenges associated with loading, integrating and analyzing multiple sources of data and how it is now possible for companies to overcome the challenges below to better understand their business and their customers’ behavior:

1) Marketing is today’s mainstream big data problem with increasingly varied data sources, and a variety of formats and volumes that traditional systems aren’t built to handle.

2) Traditional analytic platforms and established processes inhibit speed to insight and are expensive to install and maintain.

3) Successful digital analytics require the integration of several best-of-breed components.

At the Digital Analytics Association San Francisco Symposium, O’Leary joins an elite list of speakers about big data and analytics from companies including IBM, HP, LinkedIn, Intuit, Splunk, and Webtrends.

Who: Paul O’Leary, founder and CTO, Quantivo, Inc.

What: Panel Presentation: What’s Next with Big Data?

When: Wednesday, August 29, 3:15 -4:30 p.m.

Where: Mission Bay Conference Center, 1675 Owens Street, San Francisco, California 94143

If you miss the panel, you can always find us on Twitter. Ask us anything. No really, I dare you to challenge us with a question you’ve only dreamed of asking a vendor. Thank you in advance.