Joy’s post yesterday sparked my thinking about the many sources of data available to marketers in today’s world. 

Web Analytics is the low hanging fruit.  It is an important daily source of data that can help you understand how involved a customer is with your brand INSIDE your own house (i.e., your Web site).  It can even help you get a handle on how much a customer is interacting with your brand, again, within the confines of your Web site.   In our experience, most marketers don’t begin to tap the real potential of the Web Analytics tools they are using.  Even simple things like tracking conversions by keyword or source often don’t seem to happen; more sophisticated uses like measuring conversions against on-site user generated content metrics (ratings and reviews, etc.) is a real rarity.

But beyond Web Analytics, there are many sources of data and methods of measurement that help you complete your picture of the customer and how that customer interacts with the brand.  Buzz Monitoring can provide an astonishing amount of data on how the customer really feels about your brand (and what they say about it) in the great big world outside of your own Web site(s); Social Media platforms can provide a more robust picture of what your consumers actually DO (ratings and reviews, video uploads, connections made, recommendations, etc) when they aren’t in the process of actually purchasing product on your Web site.  And of course, old fashioned surveys, customer service data, and data from your CRM platform can also help round out the picture. 

The problem isn’t lack of data, but knowing what to do with it.  The magic is in the mix, i.e., combining multiple data sources and analyzing against transactions.   The good news is that it can be done.  In fact, you can probably do a lot more with what you already have (yes, I said existing sources of data).  This is the subject of a new paper Joy and I are currently working on for Measuring Word of Mouth (Volume 4, WOMMA). 

The marketing funnel has become so much more complex in an online world that is dominated by consumer generated media.  Figuring out how to use the data you’ve got and plan for the data you really need in the future is not a luxury for today’s CMO. 

Filed under: Analytics, Uncategorized on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 by Nan Dawkins |
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