This is part of a series of blog posts about the Merkle Connected CX Cloud, and how this solution addresses the key use cases and most critical challenges our clients face in achieving a robust ROI from their CX technologies, practices, and strategies. Check out part one and two.
Before being able to understand its benefits, it’s important to align on what we mean by campaign analytics, because it is a broad topic that can be taken in different ways. Gartner defines campaign analytics as, “Analytics features or tools within a specialized platform that allows marketers to collect, analyze, model, and visualize data to optimize campaigns by better understanding prospects and customers, and their behaviors across channels and how this influences a path to conversion.”
Campaign analytics help you justify the value of your marketing investments. Not only that, if you look under the hood, campaign analytics house a wealth of added benefits, from comprehensive analytics functions to audience discovery and creative advantages. However, this can only work if the foundation is in place to connect your organization’s platforms and integrations for seamless data flow and holistic analysis.
Let’s dive in to get the complete view of what we mean here:
Benefits of Complete and Comprehensive Campaign Analytics
Continuous Optimization: The days of sitting down to “do analytics” for several hours or days when a campaign reaches an endpoint have come and gone. Instead, data integrations and analysis provide the ability to make campaign tweaks within flight and see what the impact is.
Content Preferences: Consumers expect you to anticipate their needs. Campaign analytics can inform how to market to individuals by understanding what messaging/creative resonates with customers and prospects and which ads are most relevant to drive conversion.
Channel Effectiveness: The sheer number of channels to reach consumers continues to increase – and proliferation of audiences across these channels can quickly become overwhelming. Campaign analysis can help in determining where to display messages for particular consumers that produces the best results.
Customer Support: Campaign analytics also help to uncover areas of the buyer’s journey that could be simplified or improved. For example, it could show points of drop-off in the journey to highlight the ways you can reduce friction and simplify the path to conversion.
Discover New Audiences: Data analysis allows you to gain visibility into the behavioral attributes that make up campaign interactions and learn how those attributes influence the consumer’s path to conversion. With these techniques, you can build out look-alike audiences to test into and create more effective targeted advertising campaigns.
How to Get it Right
Of course, getting to a place to reap these benefits takes time and the right team, process, and technology. There are several challenges that often get in the way of getting this right. Analytics that can provide insights across all your channels must rely on a foundation and infrastructure that can bring clean, standardized, and enriched data together and then integrate it with the platforms and tools in a seamless and efficient manner to use for this benefit. Too often when working with an organization, we hear about siloed data; data stuck in its channel of execution or data that is not standardized in a way where it can marry with other channel data. These barriers inhibit analytics teams from making progress.
Two key data issues continually surface:
1. Data quantity: In today’s era of information, marketing teams are recording everything; every consumer click, impression, and view. However, this quantity of data is irrelevant if it cannot be structured and analyzed for insights that allow for in-campaign optimizations. Marketers are left wrestling with how to best organize data to evaluate its meaning. Organizations today are stuck in a place where data scientists spend the majority of their time wrangling and formatting data, rather than analyzing it which leaves a lot of revenue on the table.
2. Data quality: Not only is there a problem in terms of the massive amount of information organizations must sift through, but the data itself is often viewed as unreliable. Organizations need a process to maintain data quality so that employees can leverage accurate information to make the right decisions.
How The Connected CX Cloud Solves for This
The Connected CX Cloud is a solution that creates a flexible and scalable data asset. By leveraging common identity (powered by Merkury) to build 360-degree views of your customers and prospects, it allows organizations to bring together data to track individuals through their experience as engagements happen, both online and offline across campaigns. The CX Cloud comes with the ability to clean and enrich your data. It can leverage both terrestrial and digital identities and provides the tools to pieces to build a foundation to fuel deep analytics and personalization activation.
This exponentially improves a company’s ability to share, automate, safeguard, and activate the customer data across all channels in a privacy safe manner.
By uniting business, marketing, and IT with a singular solution to data science, customer data modeling, and data privacy and execution, the Connected CX Cloud helps these teams unlock the full value of their data to power priority use cases across each of these domains.
Want to learn more about the Connected CX Cloud? Download the guide here.
