Monday , March 18 2024
Cover Digital Marketing Analytics

Book Review: ’Digital Marketing Analytics’ by Chuck Hemann and Ken Burbary

Digital Marketing Analytics by Chuck Hemann and Ken Burbary gives explanations, tips and tools for using digital technologies in the marketing domain. The unending waves of innovative new platforms, tools, data sources, media distribution systems have thrown unique challenges to a marketer.

The challenge is to identify the unique combination of digital channel partners and platforms required to satisfy marketing objectives. Each brand now requires a digital fingerprint to identify itself in digital world.

There are ad trackers on more than 75% of websites. Until a decade ago paid media and owned media were the only two dominant media types. Paid media is literally the advertisements that are displayed on digital media such as search engines and websites.

Owned media is company owned property or media asset used to reach out to prospective customers. Examples include company websites, marketing email and even IoT devices such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home.

The authors bring up the emergence of earned media which is generated by word of mouth, buzz or a communication “going viral”. Examples of these types are facebook, instagram and twitter.

Analytics tools which are used for analysing across media types range from competitive analysis at a top level to granular level in web or click stream analysis. There are free versions of tools which provide this functionality. Facebook pages, insights, competitive and content analysis are examples of competitive analysis.

Leading platforms offer custom dashboards personalised to your site to help the digital marketer. Modern web analytics platforms allow segmentation capabilities that let you build manage and apply powerful custom segments to all of your reports. Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics are examples of these tools.

The authors also bring out the emerging field of mobile analytics. This form of analytics piggybacking on the mobile explosion is now a significant analytic tool in this domain.

The authors suggest few criteria based on their expertise which is most useful for making an evaluation of the tools that the digital marketer will come across. These are range from proprietary data sets to content performance to ability to integrate and adopt amongst others.

The business case of Cisco marketing technology stack brings out the customer centric nature of its marketing experience. The authors make a strong case for having a cross-functional decision making team to buy and monitor digital marketing solutions. Even though it seems counter-intuitive, this practice in long run provides benefits within the organization by taking on board the non-marketing senior managers.

Critical aspects of digital analysis are brand, audience and ecosystem. The book discusses multiple use cases including how latest mediums, like twitter, implement this and allow other to use it.

Authors also discuss other aspects of digital marketing analytics include methodologies to measure return on investment, understanding mechanisms of digital influence, improving customer service, and building useful reports.

One of the interesting topics in this book is using digital marketing tools to anticipate and manage crisis situations. Simply put it is across three phases – identify known issues, face the crisis day and correct history. This type of usage will also help manage marketing situations which could lead to controlling steep variations on the bourses for listed companies.

In Digital Marketing Analytics the authors have done a neat job of putting their experience and facts together. The range of tools, business use cases referred to is a shot in the arm for the student and professional digital marketer alike. The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning and its wide ranging adoption would be a good starting point for next edition of this title.

About Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay

https://linkedin.com/in/ganadeva

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