DISCUSSION

Retailers and brands shortchange cross-platform analytics tools

September 28, 2020Written by Tom Ryan

Photo: @daphneemarie via Twenty20

Only 43 percent of brands have unified cross-platform analytics capabilities, preventing a consistent and complete view of their customers’ online engagement and behavior. That’s a conclusion of the “The Future Of Analytics” study from Google and Forrester Consulting. Forrester surveyed 750 decision-makers responsible for analytics, media or marketing business insights in February and March. Among the other findings:

One-third of respondents have both website and app analytics, but siloed data;
Thirteen percent have website analytics only;
Seven percent have mobile app analytics only; and
Four percent have no analytics platform.

The survey found a major gap between how critical respondents consider cross-platform analytics to be for achieving their organization’s marketing objectives (84 percent) and how many respondents consider their organization to be very effective at cross-platform analytics (44 percent). Among the frustrations overall with analytics tools:

Analytics tools that don’t surface insights easily, 56 percent;
Inability to manage the freshness of data, 55 percent; and
A lack of customization to business needs, 52 percent.

Asked what benefits their organization has realized from a cross-platform analytics tool, the top answers were: better cross-platform customer experience, cited by 80 percent; better marketing campaign outcomes, 76 percent; and ability to identify and remediate customer experience gaps across touchpoints, 75 percent. The study stated, “Marketers often assume they know everything about their customers’ most important journeys, but cross-platform insights can reveal and help address unanticipated frustrations. For example, a spike in website activity to address a need could indicate that a customer cannot resolve their specific need through the existing content on the website. A marketer could then test different content on specific pages to address the customer need and enhance a better experience.” Other conclusions from the study included that many organizations lack advanced AI/machine learning capabilities that can provide faster and deeper insights “to make marketing faster, more targeted, and less manual.”  With increasing customer sensitivity about sharing personal, identifiable data, privacy concerns were found to be high as marketers consider future tool upgrades.

Discussion Thread0