Start Investing in Marketing Analytics: 3 Key Considerations
It goes without saying that every truly data-driven marketing department recognizes the potential of analytics. Analytics data provides powerful insights, particularly into your customers' behaviours on your website or apps.
Today we see a variety of analytics providers being used. From Google Analytics to Adobe analytics to Matomo. The choices are abundant. Even though the collection of marketing data itself doesn't come with any staggering cost, the transformation, maintenance, and insight extraction require extra attention to get it right and make it useful.
We at Vekst have identified three key considerations based on our experience that organisations should keep in mind before investing in marketing analytics, to make sure you get the most out of your analytics tools, as well as remain compliant with current regulations.
1. Get Analytics Data Together
The first step is to set up an inventory of your analytics data. Identify what is being collected, how it is being collected, by whom, and finally, where it is being sent. This is particularly important for smaller organisations where measurement work is often outsourced. Measuring without a concrete plan could lead to the risk of wasting resources, accumulating technical debt and fostering unclear accountability. Start with these simple steps:
Create a repository for third parties to fill in, and use this as the standard in your collaboration to encourage transparency and accountability.
From there, design a measurement plan for a specific purpose – whether it is an initial configuration or a specific campaign. Find a purpose for your tracking setup and implement what's absolutely necessary.
2. Don't Forget Account Ownership
Analytics often operates at the edges of digital marketing. It may be set up with initiatives from third parties for certain campaigns in the Google Marketing Platform and used to report the effort. As a byproduct, the notion of "we don't use it, so we don't need to take care of it" is not uncommon.
The organisation that owns the website, which stands behind the traffic in analytics tools, is the true owner of the tool itself. In cases where external partners/agencies are involved, ensure two things are in place: make sure you have account ownership and ensure there is an internal owner for each account. As a rule of thumb, organisations should ensure that the marketing and analytics accounts associated with their domains are governed by direct agreements between them and the platforms, rather than by third parties.
3. Privacy Is Not a Price You Want to Pay
The web is becoming more privacy-centric. Respecting GDPR and user consent while collecting data for both marketing and analytics should be a rule of thumb in handling marketing data. It should be the first question asked: What industry does my organisation operate in? How is data collection regulated within that vertical? What are the consequences of abusing user data?
Privacy wars between marketing platforms and various EU data protection authorities will continue. Advertisers will continue to remain in a fight-or-flight mode – some will be able to adapt to changes in legislation and make swift decisions, while others will be left in the unpredictable throes of shifting landscapes.
Two things organisations can start today to navigate privacy questions:
Invite your legal department into the discussion when setting up measurements for your marketing campaigns to get their sign-off.
Review the platforms' Data Policy:
Review the cookies dropped by the platforms' web pixels:
Consider investing in advanced tagging mechanisms such as server-side tagging.
Server-side tagging, in contrast to web tagging, grants advertisers more control over what is being sent to advertising platforms. It serves as a gateway between the information on the browser and the destination, built on a server that advertisers own. It is where advertisers can take the power in their own hands and redact, remove, replace information before it's dispatched to advertising platforms.
An increasing number of advertising platforms have embraced server-side tagging and now allow advertisers to send conversions through their Conversion API, including LinkedIn, one of the most important media channels for a lot of B2B businesses.
Do you have any more questions regarding data collection, privacy or analytics in general? Contact us at Vekst through info@vekst.se to discuss your tracking and analytics challenges further.
