Taking analytics out of the IT department and into the boardroom
In business there’s always a tipping point when something goes from being a ‘optional extra’ or a ‘nice to have’ to being an essential tool that underpins a company’s entire corporate strategy.
As today’s websites become more sophisticated and as more consumers interact with brands on web pages to an ever greater degree, the need for marketers, and, indeed, all senior members of a business’s management team, to understand consumer behaviour in the digital space has never been more pronounced.
Today’s data-rich sites can feel like both a blessing and a curse to some marketers. On the one hand, they offer the possibility to target customers based on their actions in ways that would have been unimaginable to their predecessors in previous eras. On the other, they demand an approach to data collection that is substantially more specialised than was the case yesteryear and more flexible, customisable, and robust than existing solutions.
It’s important for those working within RTB to acknowledge that though great steps have been made in recent years, there are still some marketers who don’t yet have the skills, experience, or budget to collect and transform all of the site-level data into insights they can take action on.
As a result, it is our duty on the tech side of the fence to design systems to address those gaps and allow marketers to focus more on the marketing decisions to be made based on the data, rather than the technical collection of the data.
Enormous advances in advertising technology have enabled marketers to successfully capture consumer data and transfer it to systems for data-driven marketing and analytics. As a result, marketers have the opportunity to better understand their customers and to leverage consumer data for acquisition, retention, and cross or up-sell efforts.
For some time, marketers have used digital tracking pixels to collect each event, product view, or interaction that occurs. This deluge of pixel placements has increased page load delay latencies on websites and is something Turn is now looking to address with a new tag management product called Flextag.
A well-known retailer recently commissioned an internal analysis to determine the effects of this increased latency. After removing all third-party pixels for a day, they observed an increase in sales greater than one per cent, suggesting that slowdown of the overall shopping experience adversely affects sales volume.
A solution was sought to the website latency issues created by pixels that would improve customer experience and sales volume and the answer was a single-deployment pixel that can sit in the footer of a page, collect the necessary data and then send it to platforms to be used in marketing and analytics efforts.
This trend has helped marketers reduce the number of pixel placements on a page, but a large problem remains with marketing teams still needing to interact closely with the IT group to identify via a site’s source code the object names on website pages and to determine how to ensure capture.
Turn’s Flextag product hopefully addresses some of these issues by putting data collection and decision making squarely in the hands of the marketing department. Marketers can decide quickly what data to capture from their website, without ever needing to know HTML, Javascript, or other web languages. This enables marketers, advertisers, and publishers to proactively and simply ingest and act upon customer data collected from websites and is something we’re excited about.
Tag management provides marketers with the tools to create a universal tag for one-time placement across the marketer’s website, to discover website event data using a self-service tool, to make the insights gleaned from the data quickly actionable and to target the data using advanced audience segmentation rules.
In our industry we are witnessing a revolution in how marketers can create custom audience segments and transform it into marketing and analytics opportunities, without reliance on outside assistance from their IT department.
Reducing the marketer’s reliance on the ‘tech guys’ to the point where analytics become a ‘hands on’ part of day to day board level discussions within companies should be the ultimate goal for tech vendors.
We hope we’re playing a part in moving our industry towards a time where C Suite executives play an active part in capturing and enriching first-party data, generating insights, and taking action against specific audience segments.
We’re fast reaching a point when data can underpin marketing strategy, content creation, and campaign development in real time and I for one am extremely excited to see it happening.
Pierre Naggar is the Managing Director of Turn EU