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Poor quality data #1 reason for uninformed marketing decisions

Poor quality data #1 reason for uninformed marketing decisions

Latest research from Gartner shows that poor quality data is the number one reason for uninformed marketing decisions.

Only 54% of marketing decisions are being influenced by marketing analytics according to Gartner’s latest Marketing Data and Analytics Survey 2020

This is a worrying trend when respondents are citing poor data quality, unactionable results and nebulous recommendations as top reasons for why they don’t rely on analytics to make decisions.

However, the survey of more than 400 marketing leaders and analytics practitioners does reveal a prevailing optimism for the future of marketing analytics in spite of the challenges and failed expectations.

Digital marketing relies on good data

Marketing today is multifaceted and goes way beyond managing a few promotional channels such as advertising or email. 

It involves managing and harnessing multiple digital channels across many devices, utilising a stack of marketing processes and technologies, whilst managing digital data. It’s vital to have the necessary infrastructure and protocols in place.  

Companies are increasing their focus on “data-driven” solutions, and they are coming to rely heavily on recommendations from peers and business partners for those tools. 

Where is marketing analytics going wrong?

Gartner’s survey found the top impediments for hindering analytics teams’ successes were:

  1. Manual Data Preparation/Pulls Take Too Much Time;
  2. Inability to Connect Data and Analytics to Business Value;
  3. Inability to Connect Analysis to Insight.

Without quality data, clear recommendations and actionable guidance, analytics can never drive change in any organisation.

Gartner’s client conversations reveal an ongoing struggle among marketing teams with their ability to prove the value of marketing analytics programs, and many CMOs are struggling to quantify the relationship between insights gleaned and their company’s bottom line.

In addition, 54% of respondents said marketing analytics hadn’t had the influence within their organisations that they expected. As CMOs have been prioritising marketing analytics as a trend for the last three years, the failure of this key enabler for digital strategies should be a concern for all in the industry. 

Digital campaign analysis is an area where analytics has the most ground to make up in order to meet the expectations of senior marketing leaders.

How to make better marketing decisions 

1. Work with accurate data

Because there are so many options available, and more tools being created all the time, it can feel overwhelming to try to narrow down your options when you’re not even really sure what you need. 

However, whatever option you choose, the tool must be able to cover the following:

  1. Deliver an immediate impact and noticeable improvement 
  2. Leverage both real-time and historical data 
  3. Have a solid foundation to use new technologies including predictive analytics, forecasting and modelling
  4. Scale and adapt based on volume, speed and variety of data while maintaining consistency.

2. Know the true campaign ROI 

Research from Marketing Sherpa E commerce Benchmark Study shows that ecommerce brands spend 29-57% of their budget on paid search and for other business sectors, marketing accounts for around 7-10% of revenue.  

Paid search can be quite a significant spend in many businesses and if the marketing analytics aren’t accurate,and you’re using poor quality data, this can be detrimental to how campaign performance is measured and what actions are taken.

Ask a paid search marketer what it means to optimise the ROI on a paid campaign and they’ll tell you it’s about working with the campaign structure (keyword strategy, ad copy and ad testing, geo targeting etc) and landing page optimisation.  

However, campaign optimisation is only half of the solution. The less talked about issue is click fraud. According to research, up to 70% of your marketing budget could be being lost to bots and click fraud.

Global losses from Click fraud have now overtaken credit card fraud. It has been dubbed the biggest story in tech that no one’s talking about and the Uber case where they turned off $100m of ad spend and saw no difference in sales illustrates this rather well.

That’s why we developed ad fraud protection as part of Veracity’s suite of features. With its smart ‘human visitors’ technology, it identifies human visitors and bots responsible for click fraud to help CMO’s have data transparency and see better returns on their ad spend.  

Veracity is the only platform on the market that tells users exactly how much of their budget is wasted on bot clicks. 

With these additional insights, you’ll be able to hone your approach to PPC and generate a better Return On Ad Spend over the long-term.

As digital ad spend continues to grow, it’s even more vital to understand campaign performance at channel, campaign and ad level with transparency around how many bots are clicking your ads and therefore wasting precious marketing budget.

3. Be aware of confirmation bias 

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to interpret any information of data as a verification of existing beliefs. It’s as important a hindrance as relying on poor quality data.

It acts as an internal “yes man” who tells you that what you think is true and the evidence being presented is proving it. 

Of course, that’s frequently not the case, so keeping this in mind during any decision-making processes is critical to being an ethical and effective marketer.

In his article “Your Brain Is Lying To You” Michael Aagaard, a Conversion Optimisation Expert, points out that, according to the last 40 years of cognitive research, favouring information that confirms your worldview is extremely common human behaviour.

About Veracity

“Tech Nation’s Rising Stars Cyber Award-Winner 2021”

Veracity – a digital intelligence platform – empowers CMOs and CFOs to improve their digital marketing performance based on accurate independent, unbiased data and insights, allowing them to reduce waste, reduce fraud, get better results and increase their digital Return On Investment (ROI).

It is a step change ahead of its competitors in a growing global market looking for the accuracy that the current technology does not give, and the recent award-win – as Tech Nation’s Rising Stars Cyber Security company – is testament to this.

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Award-winning malicious bot protection.

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