FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
UK
MEASURING BIG DATA K
nowledge, as the old adage goes, is power. But in the context of digital marketing the raw data which gives rise to
actionable insight has swelled to almost mythically vast proportions. Big data promises big opportunities. But identifying and then capitalising on those opportunities isn’t always easy. Dr Wing Yee Lee is Business Analyst Manager at Adobe. With a background in business forecasting research and enterprise software consulting, she advises clients on their business strategies across online and offl ine channels. With big data underpinning so much discussion across the digital industry, how does Lee defi ne this ubiquitous and yet potentially nebulous term?
EXTRACTING INSIGHT “Simply to talk about large amounts of data may not sound very sophisticated,” acknowledges Lee. “But the term ‘big data’ refl ects two things: fi rst, marketers see that there is insight about users to be gained from what we’re calling ‘big data’. The second thing this term refl ects is a certain nervousness, because all this data can’t be fi tted into an Excel sheet – and your Excel sheets may have a million rows already. So, when we’re talking about big data, we’re talking about extracting all that information, and then looking at the insights it can generate.” Since relevance is what makes data
valuable, brands and marketers need to think hard about how – and why – it’s
42 issue 17 may 2013
Dr Wing Yee Lee, Business Analyst Manager at Adobe, talks to Figaro Digital about turning insight into action
collected. What sort of information does Lee view as potentially useful, and how can it be effi ciently harvested? “As the name suggests,” she says, “big data has many sources. First, there’s whatever marketers can derive from their cookies or any other tracking during a user’s journey. There’s third party customer profi le data which can help with your targeting. There are domain statistics – who are the users of your sites? Then there’s marketers’ own CRM data; brands have a database of customers, but can they actually link that database to their
tracking, in order to get a better view of their consumers? And as well as that there are more generic sources such as SEO data from Hitwise.” Most digital marketers are already acutely aware that the division between online and offl ine activity is becoming less and less distinct. But for anyone seeking the bigger picture on big data, says Lee, integrating the two areas of activity is vital.
“The new term ‘omnichannel’
describes that seamless experience,” she says. “What advertisers are doing now if they’re clever is attaching an ID to a customer. Once you have that ID, or some other way of linking offl ine behaviour to online behaviour such as a store card or a loyalty card, you can look at profi ling customers. All of that
ARTICLE JON FORTGANG
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