Analytics 2.0Harvard Business Review recently published the article “Advertising Analytics 2.0” in which it discusses the unprecedented amount of data available to help marketers manage their marketing mix in today’s multi-channel environment including both on and off-line. While there is vast opportunity, so is the challenge to sift through various data sources to tune down the “noise” and find actionable insights. Those that can effectively capture these insights have shown improvements in marketing performance of at least 10% to 30%.

The article states that companies must implement new analytic strategies to harness the power of the deluge of data. They point to 3 necessary activities – Attribution, Optimization, and Allocation. Attribution is the process of qualifying the contribution of each marketing activity. Optimization is the use of predictive analytics to run various scenarios. Allocation is then the redistribution of marketing resources in real-time.

Let’s first look at Attribution. The key to this step is to collect data from a wide variety of sources across your organization including sales, customer service, distribution, and finance; publicly available data like weather, traffic, unemployment rates and consumer confidence; and of course, the data from the various marketing tactics. By layering this information on top of each other in non-structured data stores, such as Hadoop, analysis can be done to look for correlations and causal effect. Getting your data out of the silos for analysis will allow you derive more robust insights.

For the full Harvard Business Review article text, click here.