Time for Analytics to come in from the cold

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

As I wrote in my last column, 2009 is going to be a challenge for digital analytics and insights teams as they will need to get leaner, smarter and faster. I also think there’s a big opportunity to be grasped in terms of increasing the impact that these teams have on the corporate entity. As planning horizons and measurement cycles get shorter, there will be more of an emphasis on understanding and optimising the direct response model. This is where digital and direct marketing analysts traditionally ply their trade.

However, I don’t think it’s merely a question of doing more of the same and doing it more often, I think that now is the time when there is an opportunity for digital analysts to broaden their remit and expand their influence on the organisation. As Tom Davenport (author of “Competing on Analytics) puts it: “The planets are aligned for analytics”. What he means by that is that the necessary fundamentals that will allow analytical approaches to thrive in business, are in place. We have the data and we have the technology to manage and manipulate that data. With the economic situation we find ourselves in, we also have the motive. Organisations will be looking for solutions and digital analysts are well placed to provide them. To do that though, I think that digital analysts need to increasingly position themselves as data integrators and cross-channel specialists.

Too much data sits in silos and this is particularly true in the digital channel. We have web analytics data, campaign data, survey data, customer data and so on. Quite often each of these data sources will have a different business owner either within the organisation or in an agency. The value of each data source is diminished when housed and analysed in isolation, the full value comes from layering in data sources to look at different aspects of a particular problem. To do this analysts need to become masters of the data universe and be able to understand and leverage these data sources. They need to understand the nuances of each data source and be able to explain these nuances to business users who may not understand the differences between the different types of information at their disposal.

So on one level digital analysts have the opportunity to deliver increased value by taking a more holistic view when addressing issues in the digital channel. On another level I believe that digital analysts can take the lead in the development of cross-channel analytical approaches. At the heart of cross-channel analytics is customer analytics. However, quite often in organisations today customer analytics tends to ignore the digital channel and certainly the interaction between the online and the offline channel is often not well understood.

For many industries the internet has become the primary tool for researching brands, products and services even if the final transaction takes place offline. One only has to look at travel and financial services as two examples where it is probably safe to say that the vast bulk of product research takes place online. Since the internet operates “upstream” in many customer acquisition processes, it’s in the interests of the digital community to understand and demonstrate the influence the channel has in the “downstream” conversion process irrespective of whether it happens online or offline. I see therefore the development of cross-channel measurement techniques as being the domain of the digital analysts so that the full and true return on investment in the channel can be better understood. Once better cross-channel measurement processes are in place it becomes possible to develop better cross-channel marketing processes.

So if the planets are aligned for analytics generally, then it’s certainly time for digital analytics to come in from the cold and exert its influence beyond the realms of a single data source in a single channel. Data integration and cross-channel analytics is becoming the name of the game in 2009.