We are in a world now where business and marketing teams are building data driven strategies. They have access to zettabytes of data but do not know how to use the data. Or better known as “data rich, information poor”.
Data quality has huge implications on any data set we are using. The management of data is key and that is core to building a business and marketing base. This is where many businesses fall at the first hurdle. Think of a table with 4 legs at any given time one or two legs are removed then glued back on which creates instability how the table balances. Now think about how business manage their data there are similarities.
Building a business and marketing base should be a fundamental requirement of the overall business strategy. This would naturally sit within ‘marketing’, but it has a vertical impact on the business where there needs to be an alignment with key stakeholders. Investment needs to be made internally or externally to ensure that the base aligns with the business requirements.
What is the base?
- The business and marketing base is having absolute trust in the technical set-up and infrastructure ensuring there is absolute trust in the data that’s being provided
- The business and marketing base is about having high level of quality data and long data over an extended period i.e., minimum 5 years. The data should be able to provide trends and depth of data points across multiple data sources to answer the business questions.
Defining the base
As a business, how you define success will dictate the base. Developing a well-defined measurement strategy and framework is vital. Which KPI’s, metrics and data points are required for the business to build the base.
Building the base
The base is built around an infrastructure of how the data flows and that varies by the different business models. For most digital led business it would be based around two key areas:
The Technical Base
For e-commerce business the need to understand customer journeys, behaviours, acquisitions etc with web analytics tools (i.e. Google Analytics) having the right structure cannot be underestimated. Creating a structure around development, staging and production for website (and mobile app) should be a minimum requirement.
The nuances of the set-up that should be considered depending on the business size, the process with the different teams testing etc
- Development > Production (most popular)
- Development > Staging > Production
- Local Hosting > Development > Staging > Production
In most cases there is only a production set-up available which makes it high risk for bad data to be sent into Google Analytics having consequences in developing high quality data and building the data base.
Getting the right structure in place is the first step but there needs to be a rigorous process in understanding in how it is all managed. Which ever of the 3 options is selected there should be a Google Tag Manager container and Google Analytics property for each (not shared) and most importantly a Big Query data stream also set-up for each Google Analytics property. The ability to validate the data before production is worth the additional cost in understanding how the data is being collected + build the SQL query to understand if the business questions can be answered.
The Data base
With the number of data sources available and the need to have control of the data that is available to build the ‘single source of truth’ is only possible with a marketing data warehouse that provides solid and consistent data foundations to help build the data base.
What will help to build the data base is a KPI framework it ensures the right data is managed. The KPI framework is split into 4 buckets that covers the full spectrum from business to marketing and planning.
- Business – KPIs that are important to the board
- Brand + Direct Response – KPIs that are important to the marketing team
- Campaign – KPIs that help the marketing team with planning
Having mapped out the KPI’s it provides clarity in the data that needs to be cornerstone when building the data base.
Maintaining the base
How the base is maintained has consequences on the ability to answer business questions and prove the value of marketing. This can only be achieved by understanding how success is defined and what data is needed to ensure the base is maintained with a high level of quality data.
One of the best examples of the good and the bad for data when it comes to website re-design and platform migrations:
The bad – Migration goes wrong
This is a regular theme where a website migration is not planned out and the main KPI’s stop tracking and they are not tracked over an extended period. The role of tag managers in today’s ecosystem makes the process seamless so tracking inefficiencies should not be happening.
The good – The base is maintained
5 years of data with a website re-design and platform migration the base has been maintained. This is one big step towards maintaining the base but also how you manage other data sources is essential within the data lake and data warehouse.
Understanding the data
With marketing data warehouse merging data sources is very powerful, it can be complex and simplified as creating a match rate dashboard. It’s multi-purpose for many within the business from developers to ensure nothing is broken to marketing and media teams to prove how right the data is within the platforms and dashboards. The match rate dashboard helps validate the quality of data.
(Match rate % is calculated from using revenue data Shopify and Google Analytics)
Understanding the business impact
To understand business impact, it will require bringing in external data sources such as share of search data which will provide huge amount of insights on the performance v its competitors and how that is translating into business performance. Share of search (SOS) or equivalent should become central to the base data that is collected. To provide richer context it could be overlayed with the business KPI data. This would be pretty seamless to do with a solid data base that’s managed in the marketing data warehouse.
Getting the technical and data base spot-on is the most important thing any business can do. The flexibility and options it can provide are endless but also allowing creativity in how to cut and slice the data which would not have been viable previously.
The business and marketing base is essential to long term growth. Disregarding its importance could have severe implications on the business performance and growth.
