Are we at the brink of a new cross channel digital monitoring?

With the experience of working in the digital marketing space and dealing with various analytics reports over the years, an astounding fact still keeps me wondering - how can we be more effective in analyzing the marketing campaigns in the digital space & across various digital channels? Digital space does provide marketers with an enormous opportunity to dig much deeper into the marketing campaigns with the ability to analyze the “traffic”. Analytics and its ability to analyze is one attribute that always attracts me towards the digital marketing vis-à-vis traditional or print media. Mckinsey recent survey suggest that in fact, 55 percent of the companies are cutting their expenditures on traditional media in order to increase funding for their online efforts, compared with only 43 percent of the respondents whose companies don’t measure the impact.

Of course digital media has made enable marketer to build effective and efficient mean to reach its target audience. The same Mckinsey report highlights the most exciting innovations are taking place in three areas:

• In media planning, marketers have been developing analytics that allow them to compare the effectiveness of on- and offline efforts.
• They are also developing a better appreciation of how online marketing messages convert shoppers into buyers, both online and in stores, and using these insights to make specific digital-advertising techniques more effective.
• Third, to target advertising messages with greater precision, a few leaders are learning to measure the ties among people in social networks—something we call the optimization of social media.

The current economic condition and squeezed marketing budget has also been instrumental in leading marketers into this space. Of course by no mean I plan to discount the value of digital marketing space by the economic situation but highlight the importance of building a “window” to effectively monitor & especially cross channel.

The rapid increase of marketer’s dependence on the digital space and enormous growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. Hence would like to recommend a more integrated reporting mechanism or even a “unified” view of traffic. We have been working over the years in the CRM space to build a unified view of our customer, which is wonderful. However with the increase in spending ,and above all the dependence on the digital marketing; are we at a brink of a new stage of evolution in the digital media and its analytics ~ An integrated or unified view of our traffic across channels?

We have various mechanisms to monitor our website, advertisement, registration, incoming/outgoing traffic, regions, and so on. With the explosion of Web 2.0 platforms such as blogs, discussion forums, peer-to-peer networks, and various other types of social media, all of which continue to proliferate across the internet at lightning speed. Now we (marketer) even have to monitor this space. A tool that has really attracted me in the Social Media Monitoring space is Sentiment Metrics . SentimentMetrics locates and stores all the content about your brand, from millions of blogs, popular discussion boards, news and press release sites, and then cleans and analyses the data, presenting it in clear easy to read tables and graphs. Hence for companies struggling with monitoring the social media, this tool is a recommended try.

Coming back, this forces me to think that marketer spend on digital media is increasing every minute however it surprises me when the same marketers does not understand the value of analytics. Still they are happy to see Click through, webhits and so on. But does that provides enough information where you can take or implement decision based upon some serious quantifiable analysis. Unfortunately based upon my recent research and interactions with marketer, the answer is still no or not clear.

We really need to think quick and hard to how we can firstly build an effective mechanism to track and analysis the traffic, because apparently that is the fundamental to any customer, sales, and so on. Secondly we truly require a technological integrated approach to a unified view of our traffic and measure the RCQ (for reach, cost, and quality) of the same. Being hypothetical but optimistic to see the ability of analytics to track the traffic, cross channel and in an integrated manner, not matter is the ads runs on google, yahoo, facebook and so on.

Some think to ponder this weekend. Have a happy weekend.

**The article takes pointers from Mckinsey article ­– “How poor metrics undermine digital marketing” by Jacques Bughin, Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, and Marc Singer.