Saturday, June 25, 2011

Why is Digital Marketing Analytics so HOT in Analytics.

Dear Friends,

This is one of the interesting area, i thought to share with you all. Companies across US,Europe and  India had started to invest 100 million dollars/year in this area, as they see more oppurtunity in this space.

Digital Marketing Analytics consists of typical new media like Online -(Direct, Keyword,email,Rich,Non rich,and other channels in the online space), Social media,Social networks(Complex subject-Facebook is investing a lot, in this research area),Mobile,Apple -IPad,etc;

The reason being all these channels are seeing an average of 200-400% of customer usage growth in US market, as projected by Comscore,and more people are using these medium, in some or the other way contributing for revenue to  retailers,Banks,Consumer product,insurers and other services.

Then what is Digital Mareketing -Analytics?, Identifying the purchasing chain pattern of the customers in these medium,especially identifying the advertising communication flow from the sellers to customers, and feedback communication flow from the sellers to buyers , and identifying these  customer insights(buying behaviour) through data, make this subject more intersting and more complex and good for Consulatnts like us.

Was it the same before in Traditional media like TV and Print,May be the next question from the readers.? The answer is yes, but  the Financial team in big companies used to count it as marketing expenses, as there were no proper way to measure the data(Mostly Panel data was captured), eventhough good predictive models(Market Mix/Bayesian/Market Research Models) existed at that period.

But advancement of Dataware housing Platforms and Technology, the system is able to capture terabytes of every data, makes this area more accountable in the balance sheet.

From a Analytics and insights point of view,now the science as become a much an art.Even for solving a business problem lot of hypothesis and experiments have to be tried with advanced models and validated with business users for their insights and also to stand ahead of competition,as even smaller brands will give a tough fight to the bigger brands.

Let me give a example, a Funeral and Cemetry company in US, is seeing a decrease in conversions. So they analyzed the data for some insights.They tried analyzing reasons like, is it due to navigation pattern,Visitor Patteren,Traffic Pattern, Campaign Pattern, Content Mismatch,Competition Positioning,Service Bundling not good,Customer Experience not at great to customers, so you can add more to the list.

In terms of data and variables,all will have 5 to 6 granular data or Variables, for each of the Patterns(like Campaign etc) and Complex modelling technique like Bayes model or other models will be tried out- The reason being data interralation ship is also complex in this space(which in next article i will discuss the same).

Is modelling alone sufficient -No, once you have answers from different experimental models, now you need to validate with the primary research(Focus groups),Campaign managers responses, etc; Matching these they finally figured out the campaign was Trageting Rich Boomers and not ethnic hispanics, who saw the funeral as more emotional.

Once figured out the answer to business problem,the team tried to change the communication style(Neutralize the communication messaging to all different ethnic groups) and finally they could see a increase in conversions(revenue)  in the funeral comapny (This is a 2.2 Billion dollar comapany in US).

iDENTIFYING THIS INSIGHT AND SOLVING THE BUSINESS CASE MAKES DIGITAL MARKETING ANALYTICS -More Complex and INTERESTING.

Wait for Next Insights.

From
Ravi
Insight Consulatnt.

(Known is a Drop,Unknown is a Ocean -There is much more to learn than we know)