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Online Analytics in Action - The online data provides the value and it is time to let it loose

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Jul 31 2009

In another post 'Netflix: What were they thinking?' I summarized how Netflix used online data, a prize and the analytic community to increase revenue. 

In this blog I would like to focus on the biggest barrier in turning online behaviors into actionable and optimized customer interactions throughout all channels.  Let's start by breaking down the components of online analytics:

  1. Online Tracking: Many online analytic solutions are available to track online behaviors and store the data in proprietary hosted data silos.
  2. Predictive Analytics and segmentation:  Plenty of tools and techniques are available to turn online data and offline data into predictive assets, in the form of models and segments.
  3. Strategy: Marketers know well how to use analytics within customer interactions to optimize customer value
  4. Execution: Marketing automation tools, both offline and online, have evolved nicely over the past 8 to 10 years.
  5. Reporting: Those same online analytic solutions, mentioned in component #1 (online tracking), have nice reporting interfaces to track online behaviors .  Other BI tools are available as well to track offline behaviors and marketing results.

All that sounds great, right?  We can track online behaviors, develop analytics, make the analytics actionable through strategy on all channels, execute and report the results.  Perfect then ... then why don't we see a proliferation of multi-channel (online and offline) marketing systems?  In my opinion, the biggest barrier to date is online data integration into the offline marketing data mart.  Online tracking systems, for the most part, are storing the online data in a hosted online silo that is not connected to the offline marketing database. 

Some have solved this online data integration issue by manually pulling the data out of the online data silo, storing the data within the offline marketing database in periodic intervals and merging the data together with available keys (cookies, user names, customer IDs,..).  Given the current state of online analytic solutions this can be a manual, clumsy, error ridden, and costly process.  I would suggest that we can do better than that and store the online data directly within the offline marketing database as the online behaviors occur in real time, which streamlines the process and enables true real time multi-channel marketing. 

 Tools and techniques are available to track online behaviors as they occur in real time and store the data in any multi-channel database, regardless of the database type or location.  Once that online integration is complete, then the 5 components I identified above may be well-integrated to truly optimize customer value.  Check back periodically as we will be presenting our suggested solution to this common online data integration problem.  

The online data provides the value and it is time to let it loose.

 

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