Digital Marketing Data Asset

In this era of using data to measure every performance of digital marketing efforts, it is no brainer to consider and treat your digital marketing data as an asset.
Generally speaking, an asset is defined as “A resource with economic value that an individual, corporation or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide future benefit.”

It certainly sounds like useful data could be an asset. As we all know more and more companies are generating profits and contributing to country’s growth through data business. In my view, this applies to any businesses or industries. Let’s focus on Digital Marketing Data.

Experts in the field of digital marketing and analytics are well aware of the available quantitative data, highlighting few:
– Traffic to the site and by different acquisition channels
– Traffic to pages
– Key events that occur or take by your website visitors

– Basket measures to track the commerce performance

– Active users that define how good your online service is performing

So any of these worthy of calling it an asset?

Many experts will say, you’ll need to quantify the value of your data. Some will say, go analyze it by seeing what if you have an incorrect data, and review the impact on business.  In other words, data completeness would be key in taking into consideration of rather treat your data as an asset.

In my view, any data in this era could be valuable and are worthy of treating like an asset. There would need to be priorities on selecting which data, but recent data storage and infrastructure have become a commodity. I believe that good analysts will be able to extract value out of massive amounts of data, but would definitely require good planning around it.

How you prioritize what data would be an asset to you would be determined by a couple of things:

– Data completeness

– Data quality

– Availability of the data

– How actionable the data would be

When data is treated like an asset, the first thing that comes to my mind is warehousing the data. Businesses like to spend money on the sales side, but if you look at companies that are making huge dollars from pure digital services, they’re treating user behavior data like the most important thing in their company.

I’m going to borrow Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in Facebook’s IPO filing —

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

Wow… ok so this is no brainer to me. Building great service means, understanding your consumer/customer, and continue to build better experience by continuing to optimizing the service.

The top companies championing digital data that drives fast revenue growth than any traditional companies are analyzing the crap out of the massive amount of user data.  It is not surprising that they are making investments to drive and acquire users, improve engagements, and building the best user experience to grab user’s attention.

They are collecting, processing, and storing non-sales data and ACTING upon it. Great services then yield massive amounts of revenue opportunity.

Instead of focusing purely on sales and review what worked or what didn’t in the sales area.  These companies look at consumer’s footprints and other non-sales measures to lead the path to better service or growth.

Check out this McKinsey’s report showing how there is a wide gap in digital maturity amongst big corporations.  It is stunning how it reveals companies who are falling behind in digital maturity are due in large part of a lack of strategy and actions taken around the digital data services.

I can hear people say, “well I got my web analytics data in Google Analytics or in Adobe SiteCatalyst so that’s it right?”.

I say go do your homework and see how long they keep the data and ask if you really want to keep your company’s asset in someone else’s hands and always have some dependencies around it on the third party? Not sure about you, but I’ll say “NO”.

Thankfully, these data companies realize the importance of getting data out of their platform, so most of them provide some form of API interface to query/export data outside of their GUI tool. I love running data out of API and use services that integrate them.  It allows companies to build their own data warehouse and gives a tremendous amount of leverage to integrate various data and perform valuable analysis beyond “web site” analytics.

Many companies doing simple stuff out of small sites, I would still challenge them to think about the long-term big picture, especially if the company is “going” to invest in digital space.
A lot of people measure future success by comparing against previous historical data. Some companies plan on historical data and profile data to learn possible opportunities, looking forward to being prescriptive about the action to take.

These web data could be used in predictive modeling, marketing mix modeling, marketing media planning, CRM/Web Behavior segment targeting, etc.

SO.. digital data does seem to be important right?!