Digital Marketing Analytics: In Theory And In Practice

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From Kevin Hartman, Director of Analytics at Google, comes an essential guide for anyone seeking to collect, analyze, and visualize data in today’s digital world.

Even if you know nothing about digital marketing analytics, digital marketing analytics knows plenty about you. It’s a fundamental, inescapable, and permanent cornerstone of modern business that affects the lives of analytics professionals and consumers in equal measure. This five-part book is an attempt to provide the context, perspective, and information needed to make analytics accessible to people who understand its reach and relevance and want to learn more.

PART 1: The Day the Geeks Took OverThe ubiquity of data analytics today isn’t just a product of the past half-century’s transformative and revolutionary changes in commerce and technology. Humanity has been developing, analyzing, and using data for millennia. Understanding where digital marketing analytics is now and where it will be in five, 10, or 50 years requires a holistic and historical view of our relationship and interaction with data. Part 1 looks at modern analysts and analytics in the context of its distinct historical epochs, each one containing major inflection points and laying a foundation for future advancements in the ART + SCIENCE that is modern data analytics.

PART 2: Consumer/Brand RelationshipsThe methods that brands use to build relationships with consumers – online video, search, display ads, and social media – give analysts a wealth of data about behaviors on these platforms. Knowing how to assess successful consumer/brand relationships and understanding a consumer’s purchase journey requires a useable framework for parsing this data. In Part 2, we explore each digital channel in-depth, including a discussion of key metrics and measurements, how consumers interact with brands on each platform, and ways of organizing consumer data that enable actionable insights.

PART 3: The Science of AnalyticsPart 3 focuses on understanding digital data creation, how brands use that data to measure digital marketing effectiveness, and the tools and skill sets analysts need to work effectively with data. While the contents are lightly technical, this section veers into the colloquial as we dive into multitouch attribution models, media mix models, incrementality studies, and other ways analysts conduct marketing measurement today. Part 3 also provides a useful framework for evaluating data analysis and visualization tools and explains the critical importance of digital marketing maturity to analysts and the companies for which they work.

PART 4: The Art of AnalyticsEvery analyst dreams of coming up with the “Big Idea” – the game-changing and previously unseen insight or approach that gives their organization a competitive advantage and their career a huge boost. But dreaming won’t get you there. It requires a thoughtful and disciplined approach to analysis projects. In this part of the book, I detail the four elements of the Marketing Analytics Process (MAP): plan, collect, analyze, report. Part 4 also explains the role of the analyst, the six mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (“MECE”) marketing objectives, how to find context and patterns in collected data, and how to avoid the pitfalls of bias.

PART 5: Storytelling with DataIn Part 5, we dive headlong into the most important aspect of digital marketing analytics: transforming the data the analyst compiled into a comprehensive, coherent, and meaningful report. I outline the key characteristics of good visuals and the minutiae of chart design and provide a five-step process for analysts to follow when they’re on their feet and presenting to an audience.