This week three months ago, I changed careers. I transitioned from a role in Media Planning (helping clients make advertising and media investment decisions) to a role in Digital Media Analytics (analyzing the effectiveness of digital advertising investments).
Since digital analytics is a new and emerging field – and it’s even newer to me – I purposefully waited a few weeks to address this topic in my blog. However, at this point I can confidently present my working theory of the essence of digital media analytics.
The Essence of Digital Media Analytics:
Bridging the gap between business success metrics (usually lift in sales or brand equity) and metrics that are possible to measure (e.g. Clicks, Page Views, etc…).
The web is widely considered the most measureable medium – however for all the measurement hype the actual things that are measureable about online advertising aren’t necessarily that useful. Outside of strict direct response advertisers that can tie online purchase back to advertising units (e.g. Dell Computers or a similar online retailer) there is always a gap between what advertisers want to measure and what is easily measureable given the available tools.
The reason the title of this post is “The Art of Digital Media Analytics” – and not “The Science of Digital Media Analytics” is that it takes some creativity to assemble a montage of metrics that can be seen as indicative of advertising success. When clients really want to measure lift in sales – and all you can measure is clicks and page views, the operation of building an ROI model is definitely more art than science.
More on this subject to come.