Teradata Magazine Online

Features

Feature

Seize the Sale

Digital marketing optimization helps companies get smarter and save.

by Stephanie McReynolds and Colleen Quinn

After a slump in 2009, online advertising is once again witnessing meteoric growth. Global spending on online advertising is expected to increase by 16% in 2011 alone, according to ad agency ZenithOptimedia.

This type of advertising represents yet another medium in a series of channels that organizations need to optimize to effectively reach their customers and get the most out of online ad spending. Meeting these challenges used to be difficult at best. Now there’s a better way.

Brand-Defining Breakthrough

Digital marketing optimization provides a detailed understanding of advertising reach and performance, and a means to maximize efforts across all channels. The result is continuous improvement in advertising messaging, placements and media buys, which enhances strategic marketing efforts, boosts targeting abili­ties to engage the right audiences and promotes higher returns. It can also:

• Improve the customer experience. Better analysis of cross-channel information helps marketers determine how to optimally lay out each Web page for the best usability and engagement. Additionally, analysis of complex patterns using click-through and search data, combined with historical behavior trends, demographic data and other information, can help market­ers know exactly where to place advertisements on a page for the greatest response. This information also helps marketers structure the product and navigation to drive customers to complete their transac­tions more efficiently.
• Bolster productivity and reduce marketing costs. Analyzing market­ing effectiveness by channel can help illuminate the potential trade-offs between media-buying investments and guide the marketing strategy. Armed with better, more granular information, companies can more easily and economically deliver an improved marketing mix based on customer preferences.
• Lift revenue. Optimizing market­ing spending can lead to lower operations costs. At the same time, better ad buys and placements garnered through digital market­ing optimization can improve customer response rates while increasing revenue and profits for the entire organization.

An Aha Moment for Digital Marketing

The ability to integrate and track increasing volumes of information from a variety of sources is a wide­spread and growing challenge. And the types of data available for analysis are evolving. In addition to traditional structured data—easily stored in rows and columns—there is an explosion of multi-structured data, typically com­prising long strings of characters with little structure. Such data doesn’t lend itself well to analysis in a traditional relational environment.

Often, when navigating the variety of data sources and types, organizations rely on standard analytics tools. While those provide a great place to start, they’re incapable of tapping into a world of deeper insights available through analysis of detailed, often raw, data.

The best digital market­ing optimization solutions allow organizations to quickly and effec­tively capture and analyze the most valuable information into consumer site navigation and interaction. These are often gleaned from multi-structured channels. Blogs, for example, generate up to 10TB of data per day—roughly the equivalent of 2 million e-books. Social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook provide informa­tion on relationships, “friend” networks and other community structures. And clickstream data, in general, is an almost endless source of detail.

Capturing this information is just the beginning. Unlocking its value is achieved when businesses are able to identify unanticipated patterns and connections, creating true aha moments. The keys to this insight are unique processes—including graph, path and time-series analysis—that support ultra-fast, deep analytics.

An effective digital marketing opti­mization solution will also comple­ment and enhance an organization’s data warehouse. The solution can integrate new intelligence from raw, multi-structured sources with data stored in the warehouse, creating capabilities to respond to aha patterns and connections.

From Insight to Action

With a digital marketing optimization solution, businesses can build on the knowledge gleaned from their data ware­house to gain more useful information from new and emerging digital channels. Then they can transform that insight into actionable marketing intelligence for the benefit of the entire organization.

Stephanie McReynolds is the director of product marketing at Teradata Aster. She has more than 10 years of experience marketing business intelligence (BI) and data ware­house solutions.

Colleen Quinn is the Teradata global program director of interactive advertising and media. She has more than 10 years of experience in digital media.