Even in today's hyper-connected world, the two most integral sets of marketing data are still (as they traditionally have been) owned by different parts of the ecosystem.
Agencies typically control and have access to all of the granular campaign data, as they are the ones with access to the ad serving tools. Their top priorities are media buys and their own channels.
Brand marketers generally retain control of web analytics platforms (which are often used to look at campaign data), and seldom share this information with their agencies. It's rare that marketers look at integrating the data to create a more holistic view of both spend and activity.
Why did this disconnect happen? One theory is that many marketers may have confused "consumer data" with "campaign data," and web analytics got caught up in the process. With confusion over who should own this, and agencies being somewhat slow out of the gate to offer web analytics services, marketers have always wanted to keep full control of their data.
All of this should and will change. Agencies need to remain involved with the latest technology, while marketers should focus on their main competency -- building their products or services.
If the two parties shared the information by integrating the platforms (predominantly ad serving and web analytics), they would create greater campaign insights that simply can't be sourced from the data they have independently. What we really need to be doing is looking at influence from several angles: multi-channel, specific channel, geo-specific, customer performance (such as client side data, customer preferences, etc.), and campaign-specific influences. By combining all these data sets, all parties get exponentially better, more actionable information at their disposal.
But which parts of a marketer's wish list can be ticked off by doing this?
- Senior members of the team will want specific and customized top-level reports every week. This also creates a clearer way to track the success of certain campaigns over time.
- Marketers also want to view the success of their budgets across specific channels.
- Integration allows you to view where acquisition figures are coming from geographically.
- All of this means that marketers can hold agencies accountable for the results they produce.
This seems pretty weighted toward the marketer, but what about benefits for agencies?
- Agencies want to optimize their budgets by eliminating the channels that aren't performing well.
- This creates an agency scorecard, providing measurable reporting on a range of activities and their efficiency.
- Agencies are able to view CPAs, CPCs, or CPMs in almost real time.
- Each agency can track where quality customers come from (over time), and which channels they responded to.
- Agencies will manage themselves through transparency of information and won't be striving for CTR but will rather be focused on KPIs and market share.
Most third-party platforms have an API that can export data into another platform, allowing for an insight reporting suite to be integrated seamlessly. However, though the logistics of integrating both platforms is difficult enough, agencies and marketers alike also need to consider that there is a certain amount of investment in building relationships between one another. After all, when you throw data ownership into the mix, things become tense.
When you take a step back and weigh the benefits for all parties versus the investment (in time, resources, and efforts), there are far more negatives associated with not integrating your systems than with taking the plunge.
Chris Neuner is SVP of agency solutions at Acceleration.
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