Media Team, Your Secret Weapon is Already in Your Organization: The Analytics Team
When we begin working with new clients, the conversation quickly focuses on the analytics tag. Well, actually many analytics tags since most brands leverage multiple solutions (a recent Forrester survey indicates 60% of organizations use more than one analytics tool). This includes any combination of Omniture, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, WebTrends, etc. We’ve seen them all.
Web analytics is an established practice, with teams of analysts dedicated to the care and feeding of these powerful systems. Web analysts are masters of their admittedly fragile tag; they navigate custom attributes, eVars, META tags, and labels with ease. Yet, to anyone outside of the analytics team, the analytics tag can be a mystery. To many, where the data comes from and how it flows into nicely packaged reports is magic. Coveted data such as in-page behavior, funnel reporting, and channel attribution is traditionally siloed away in powerful web analytics systems.
Unlocking the Power of Your Analytics System to Drive Better Marketing Results
Lucky for you, your colleagues hold the key and, together, you can do some pretty amazing things. A unifying platform like BrightTag brings all of a marketer’s third-party services together under one virtual roof, with no locked doors. The mysterious ways in which the analytics team has gathered treasured data need not be a complicated endeavor. In fact, that same data can be readily available for all teams to utilize and feed into their own systems.
Our clients see a tremendous amount of benefit when the lines of data communication are opened and silos are removed between media and analytics teams. For example:
- A retailer leveraging analytics-like customer attributes to create remarketing segments representing the customer’s level of intent – such as logged-in status, basket size, whether someone read a product review, or zoomed in on a product image
- An auto manufacturer optimizing campaigns based not only on whether the visitor requested a test drive but also based on what values were entered into the form such as zipcode, model or trim
- A travel marketer using insights to determine which conversion tags to fire on any given reservation and, as a result, reducing affiliate acquisition costs
- A mass merchandiser expanding their search reach by passing back on-site search keywords to their SEM keyword portfolio
We hear it all the time: “Wow, you mean I can pass data to my DSP about actions a visitor takes inside of a page?” or “I had no idea I could pass rich analytics data back to my ad server.” Data is only data unless it can be made actionable and put to good use.
The impact of sharing data across teams is immediate and the analytics teams we work with welcome the opportunity to show off what their systems can do. Once they understand what kind of information is needed to drive media, they can directly contribute to better, qualified leads, conversion, and ultimately, cash flow.
One of the many benefits of a platform like BrightTag is that no matter where the conversation begins, there is value to be delivered across all stakeholders and, more importantly, the business. It has been really rewarding to see how a technology platform such as ours can be the glue that helps our customers unlock their analytics data from the confines of its restrictive tag.
As SVP of Client Services for BrightTag, Kelly Davis leads the client-facing team responsible for partnering with BrightTag customers to maximize the value they get from the company’s integration platform. Armed with over 12 years of digital media experience in ad operations, account management, analytics and product management, Kelly most recently lead the product management and media buying divisions at Centro, a Chicago-based media logistics firm, and was instrumental in the company’s success as one of Centro’s founders. Kelly is a graduate of Indiana University and holds a MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.