In many organizations, advertisers are caught up in the time-consuming chore of campaign management and rarely move beyond basic reporting. However, the most successful advertisers are learning to automate their basic reporting. That gives them more time to focus human skill on exploration of more advanced analytics. It all comes down to a balance between the roles of people, process, and technology.

Focus on People
Balanced teams break down silos that often exist between analytics and advertising teams. Walls between these teams result in competitive mistrust and data restriction in a “need to know” attitude. Both sides must choose to proactively break down those walls by realizing the simple fact that both analysts and advertisers needs to know how to maintain accountability for customer experience beyond the click.

The idea is to create an advertiser-analyst hybrid that automates basic reporting to focus on advanced analytics insights.

Let People Drive the Process
It’s easy to become bogged down in the process of basic updates where people are treated like report monkeys who can only focus on basics like conversion run rates, spend pacing, engagement trends, year over year deltas, and channel totals. The chores of campaign management under-utilize people by treating them like robots.

A deeper focus on people, however, should also drive a different way of looking at the process. An important step toward making the process more people-centered is to foster curiosity within your company culture. Organizations need to make it safe for people to take risks so they can go in and look at things in ways they’ve never looked at them before.

Advertisers should be able to go beyond top-level marketing-channel averages by pivoting into the details of the account structure. That way opportunities can be traced back to the ads and placements where focused changes can be made.

Use Technology to Amplify the Human Component
Advertisers and analysts are both irreplaceable when they focus more on the explanatory and prescriptive work of interpreting data instead of just parroting back basic descriptive narration of the latest dashboard refresh. Technology is important, but it should be used to free up the advertiser-analyst hybrid to do the custom exploration and pivots of advanced analytics.

With basic analytics, everything is paired in volume and efficiency. The problem is that there are too many case studies that say things like, “we tripled our return on ad spend, or cut our cost per acquisition by a third” without any perspective on what the volume was associated with that efficiency.

The reality is that averages lie. Advertisers focus on conversions, but few focus on non-converting costs or ignored impressions. If you were to simply improve the experience of your top 10 loss leaders with significant cost but no conversions or huge impression totals but no engagement, you could make a significant dent in your average account performance. The idea is to look at your conversion funnel, filter for zero in your current KPI, and fall back to the next best metric in the funnel to find where your other bottlenecks are (as described in more detail here: http://www.slideshare.net/chrishaleua/ppc-hero-conference-performance-segments).

This dead-end quadrant performance segmentation framework is applicable to products, pages, campaigns, ads, keywords, and placements. Each of them must find the balance between volume and efficiency to be profitable. A helpful way to think of this is to apply the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. But instead of just focusing on the minority of objects that are impacting the majority of your revenue, also fall back to find the few products with many cart additions but no orders or the few pages with many views but no cart additions.

Many organizations are beginning to utilize an integration of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Media Optimizer to automate much of their basic reporting so they can free up time and attention to focus on advanced analytics. What’s important is that a company’s advertising team and analytics team feel like they’re speaking the same language — whether they’re using native integrations or an open architecture.

A Combination of People, Process, and Technology
We’ve seen that a combination of people, process, and technology leads to deeper analytics insights. By moving beyond basic analytics, advertisers are better able to understand their customers and make better marketing decisions in light of the data.

This post taken from http://blogs.adobe.com

Kalyan Banga

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