Four Steps to Aggregating Marketing Data at Scale

Given today’s increased consumer protection regulations, as well as the deprecation of user-tracking mechanisms such as third-party cookies, marketers have begun to take a much more privacy-focused stance on the data they collect to inform their advertising strategies. They are also actively engaging with various technology partners to explore other available options.

This shift has clarified the importance of prioritizing first-party data as a key business asset to help brands set themselves apart from the competition.

Here, in this article, we explore some suggestions on how to maximize the value of first-party marketing data and turn its potential into a true competitive advantage:

Getting your house in order

Email subscriptions, content download forms, and website purchases are among a wide variety of customer data sources. And even with the departure of third-party cookies, first-party cookies will still exist, alongside the new technologies that continuously emerge, including alternative IDs such as RampID or UI 2.0.

Ensuring all different data sources are collected and stored in a consented, unified fashion is the key to making data work harder for you. Businesses should take the time to plan and invest in a good internal database with tight governance and operations processes to consolidate and standardize all different inputs.

There is a reason why 50% to 80% of a data team’s time relates to cleaning and wrangling tasks – even a state-of-the-art prediction algorithm needs a quality dataset to work with if we want to maximize the value of the output. An infinite amount of enrichment and analysis can follow, but this is a crucial first step.

Between customer data platforms, data connectors and no-code automation platforms, the analytics and intelligence space has evolved considerably and is now accessible to other roles in an organization outside of data science or engineering specialisms.

Measuring what matters and not settling for the status quo

Most marketing can be attributed to a few objectives, such as increasing market share or driving sales and revenue to an organization. However, it is not uncommon for advertising activities to be measured by KPIs far removed from those goals and with little connection to what CMOs are trying to achieve at a higher level.

Shifting from flawed last-touch attribution methods and toward metrics like brand recall and awareness, or marketing mix modeling, which takes into account all budget spent, will provide marketers with much more accurate answers about which half is working and which one is not.

While cookies force us to move away from one-to-one tracking, that doesn’t mean the measurement of ROAS will also go away. If anything, this is an excellent opportunity for companies to re-evaluate and rethink their current martech stack – questioning how each piece is or isn’t driving value, understanding precisely what it does, and not settling for inadequate black-box answers.

Also published in: AIThority

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