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Mar 11 2009

Online marketing trends come and go, but none take permanent root without a supporting data strategy.  That's right, a data strategy.  It really is that simple.  No behavioral targeting tool, ad serving platform, or marketing automation solution is worth much without it.  They are blunt instruments without an underlying analytics engine to chart the course.  And I don't mean the 12TB of data streaming directly out of your web analytics tool into some poor analyst's lap, but a true understanding of how to distill and parse that data into something meaningful and, wait for it ... actionable.

As an example, many of our online content publishing clients are heavily focused on the concept of yield management or yield optimization.  This discipline, typically jointly owned by Marketing, Operations & Sales, was initially developed in an effort to drive maximum volume in order to deliver on oversold ad commitments.  Those were the days, right?  In today's environment, yield management is much more focused on delivering quality than scale.  Many online publishers still struggle to monetize their content, despite a great product.  The primary reason is because they have been unable to prove the value of their audience to capture brand budgets or attract the big Auto, CPG, or Entertainment advertisers.  As a result in these economically challenged times, online buys become much more fragmented, counting on niche content players to deliver what is perceived to be "targeted" audiences.  Worse yet, advertisers turn to third party ad networks to deliver scale and dismiss the value of context.  Either way, the result is anemic ad performance driving down CPMs industry wide.

The answer is harnessing the power of your existing data.  Many of our clients are intimidated by the notion of online analytics, segmentation, or user valuation because they have yet to properly consolidate their data.  They are sitting on top of one massive data warehouse or so many different little data marts that they don't even know where to begin.  And the small stable of data architects and analysts they do have spend all of their time responding to ad hoc queries and reporting patchwork with no time to focus on an underlying data strategy. 

Time to stop telling yourself that you've got it covered with your ad serving system or behavioral targeting technology.  The truth is without the right data strategy and resulting analytics engine feeding them, you are selling yourself and your advertisers short.  But you don't need me to tell you that story, your unsold inventory and declining CPMs already are. 

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