Leverage Data To Drive Revenue & Boost Your Ecomm Business

Using relevant data to make marketing decisions sounds like a no-brainer, but even with data’s value beyond doubt, some brands struggle with leveraging data to its full potential. Companies seeking to maximize data for better ad performance are likely to find attribution and activation at the center of the discussion, but how can advertisers ensure these processes are working optimally?

Gathering accurate data and listening to what it says are central to any successful ecommerce business. Here’s what marketers are doing now to unlock data findings and translate them into actionable insights.

Mistakes Marketers Make When Using Data

Data is meant to inform decisions, but it can be flawed if acquired, interpreted, or applied incorrectly. Using time frames that don’t match your product sales cycles, measuring the wrong KPIs for a given goal, or failing to factor in other variables like offline activity and seasonality can lead to incomplete data and less-effective guidance. Data accuracy is crucial to meaningful decision-making, so be sure your data-gathering processes take these factors into account.

Of course, even the best data can’t make an impact when it is ignored — one Gartner survey discovered roughly one-third of marketers ignored data conflicting with their intended course of action. The same study learned marketing analytics are responsible for just over half (53%) of all marketing decisions, suggesting not all those in charge of campaigns and promotions are determined to follow what the data is telling them.

Driving Decisions with Better Activation and Attribution

For all the focus placed on data acquisition, a good portion of marketers still fail to apply first-party data when developing digital strategies. Maximizing the impact of company data on marketing decisions requires sound attribution practices and the means to “activate” relevant findings, transforming them from a sea of general insights into actionable guidelines and ultimately successful campaigns.

As discussed often on our team’s blog, the right attribution model paints a detailed image of how the average user discovers your brand, becomes a paying customer, and every incremental step in between. If your attribution models are appropriately tuned and your brand can identify which channels, messages, and creativity are actively driving shoppers through the sales funnel, advertisers can take the resulting data and replicate these steps with greater efficiency.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to attribution and data activation — longer lookback windows might work for certain industries and represent useless “fluff” data to others. That’s what makes data activation a work in progress for brands even now (especially when combining data sets), despite widespread acknowledgment of the power and value of data in marketing.

Though finding the optimal attribution and activation from a brand’s historical data takes time and experimentation, the right marketing partner can greatly accelerate the process.

Trends To Help Leverage Existing Data for Maximum Return

Using branded data to its fullest is a universal goal for marketers, but the various means to achieving that end are virtually limitless. Some broad trends have emerged to form a foundation of good practices in the present marketing landscape, including:

-Using AI and machine learning to more accurately predict customer behavior based on familiar data patterns
-Applying data to advanced “lead scoring” practices, identifying the highest-potential leads among a given audience
-Learning from historical data to maximize an existing customer’s value through upselling and cross-selling products
-Evaluating marketing performance through the proper metrics and reallocating resources to where they can prove most effective
-Identifying channels that either aren’t contributing to marketing success or are in need of a change in KPI and marketing focus to better play to the channel’s strengths

Understanding not only data’s value but its potential applications — even if it means changing a current promotion’s course — can lead marketers to make genuine data-driven decisions and find greater success in the evolving digital marketing arena.

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