I was looking at the market share of Google Analytics (GA) and it is definitely on the rise. So I was curious to see the capabilities and what this tool can do. Of course it is a great campaign management tool. It’s been a while since I worked on campaign management.
I wanted to know all the more now about this tool, off to YouTube and got myself up to speed on the tools capabilities. Right off the bat I noticed campaign management has changed drastically compared to the days when we were sending email blasts or snail mail, junk mail etc. I remember the days when we generated email lists and run it through third-party campaign management tools, blast it out to the world and wait. Once we get enough data (mostly when the purchase the product) to run the results through SAS, we could see the effectiveness. It took more than a month to see any valuable insights.
Fast-track to the social media era, GA provides instant results and the intelligent click-stream data for tracking campaign management in real-time. Checkout the YouTube Webinars to see what GA can do in a 45 min.
On a very basic level, GA can track the new visitor, micro conversion (download a newsletter, or add something in a shopping cart), Macro Conversion (buy a product), or is it a returning customer. GA can track the ad-word traffic (how did they get to the website, trigger). It also has a link tag feature– which is very useful to identify the channel (email, referral website etc), linking the traffic to a specific campaign, based on the origination. It has many other features besides cool reports and analytical abilities as well.
There is so much information collected whether the customer buys a product or not. How much of this web analytics data is part of enterprise data. Does historical analysis include this data? Is this data used for predictive and prescriptive analytics? It is important to ask the following questions to assess what percentage of gathered information is actually used at the enterprise level:
- How well the organizations integrate this campaign data into enterprise data?
- Do they collect and manage new prospect information at enterprise level?
- Does the organization use this tool to enhance their master data?
This may become a Big Data question, depending on the number of Campaigns/ hits and the amount of micro activates the site can offer. Chances are that the data resides in silo or at a third-party location and the results are not stored in the enterprise data.
