Tell me if this sounds familiar: Your company’s search team thinks that a set of specific keywords caused the recent lift in sales. Your website team believes that their recent redesign has increased engagement. Your mobile team is certain that their new app is the source of positive growth. The online video team thinks that their programmatic ad strategy is working wonders.
It all sounds like good news…but as a CMO, how can you move forward confidently when each of your teams reports that, according to their numbers, it is the flagship channel and should receive the lion’s share of the next budget? And consider the opposite situation, where the marketing ROI is dropping and you don’t know where to cut your losses. These blind spots can multiply when there is no standardized data set, and you might get concerned about data quality.
The CMO Dilemma
For CMOs, receiving conflicting conclusions from various insights teams across the marketing organization can be problematic. And it can happen any time that teams aren’t working from the same data.
The failing of today’s marketers to fully adopt a cross-channel, holistic approach affects far more than just their ability to simply retarget a desktop user on a mobile device. It can have even more wide-ranging and negative effects on the bottom line, simply because the insights teams aren’t on the same page.
It’s not the fault of the individual channel teams. They’re probably using single-channel platforms, which track customers exposed to their efforts and report accordingly, resulting in accurate yet conflicting reports. As each customer engages with multiple marketing touchpoints (perhaps a search click, followed by a banner ad, then a website visit before converting) each system tallies a win, even though a more accurate way of measuring would divide credit among the different interactions.
Get on the same page
Attribution systems rose to meet this measurement challenge years ago, but they too collect and analyze only the data they can aggregate, which means they are also working from still a different starting point than the rest of the teams.
Only when all marketing reporting and analytics teams work from the same, authoritative dataset can all of the insights be truly compared against each other.
Signal offers that starting point. The Signal open data platform provides best-in-class data collection tools and a centralized data hub for marketers to connect all of their customer engagement data, from any channel or device. From this hub, marketers can distribute their unified datasets across their organization to ensure each team works from the same numbers. Each team also gets the added benefit not having to spend the time and effort to collect data individually; Signal collects all the data for a clear view of what’s working, and what’s not.
Banish confusion from your marketing organization at last. Get your teams working from the same, unified dataset—so everyone can have the right answer.
Originally published January 15, 2015