Mar 10, 2010

Five Marketing Mistakes You Can Avoid by Using Cross-Channel Attribution

Posted by Wendy Weber

Although you can click here for the article in its entirety, a summary of the article by Anto Chittilappilly follows:

1. Odds are that you are not collecting marketing data, or you have lots of data that you are not using to make the right marketing decisions. Most data collected is in aggregate form, which is not useful for finding insights. Moreover, it is often spread over different entities such as agencies, publishers, media planners, and business units, and it is fragmented across several Excel and PowerPoint files, Access databases, and relational systems.

An integrated data warehouse for all marketing data and results—which is part of any cross-channel attribution strategy—is crucial for being able to act on the data you have.

2. Most marketers and their agencies are forced into the long-held practice of tracking marketing performance in silos—that is, each channel is measured using different metrics.

3. Too often, the same advertiser will run several campaigns at once, with no tie among them to help boost overall success, or the advertiser will not align timing among those programs.

4. Admitting that your decisions are based on gut feelings is difficult, especially when there is a lot of data processing and report generation underway. But, often, decision-making can be subjective and based on gut feelings at the executive and execution levels. The author feels that is a mistake.

5. Good ideas may take time to cultivate, but it is the the marketer who has the better process and technology to make better decisions and who acts quickly who succeeds. Don’t take too long to implement a good idea.

In