THE ANALYTICS FIX

By Kevin Geraghty

Kevin Geraghty

Editor’s Note: Kevin Geraghty, the editor-in-chief for INFORMS Online, is now blogging on the Analytics Magazine website. Below is his initial posting. To read his latest blog, visit www.analytics-magazine.org.

Every day I come to work in digital marketing I find everything has been overturned and needs to be radically rethought. It’s a blast. I made the jump from offline in 2000. I already had a 15-year analytics career behind me but there was very little tolerance for my ignorance. Eventually I realized that nobody really knew what they were doing and that their arrogance was merely a defense mechanism. In digital I have found an opportunity to apply, with just a few tweaks, analytic models that have been proven offline, and get extraordinary results.

This is the first in a planned series of posts targeted at analytic professionals who would like to get a piece of the digital action. I will focus on digital marketing because that’s where I work now, but hopefully broader insights will pop out of the discussion.

Digital marketing is applied to a number of non-traditional marketing channels including paid search, display, natural search, affiliate, email, social and mobile.

• To understand Paid Search, go to Google or other search engine and search for “socks.” You will be presented with a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Down and to the left are the natural results. On the right and sometimes across the top are the sponsored ads. Advertisers pay on a per click basis for their ads to show in response to a search. They compete in an auction for the highest rankings on the page. In theory, whoever can make the most money out of a click can afford to bid the most for the traffic.
• Display ads are presented on websites around the World Wide Web in much the same way as display ads are presented on billboards, magazines or TV. However the magic of cookies allows display ads to be targeted in a way offline could never hope to achieve.
• Showing up in Natural Search depends on your ability to establish relevance with the search engines. This starts with making sure the engines can easily read your site and understand what it is about. Natural search is regarded as earned media, as opposed to display and paid search that is paid media, because the audience is not achieved by paying someone for it. It is earned by delivering relevant content.
• Email marketing is a similar analytic challenge to direct mail with more detailed data and a few more moving parts. Affiliate marketing is based on marketing partners who bring you customers you could not otherwise reach. Affiliates get paid on a per-lead or per-action basis.
• Online Social environments offer marketers and unique opportunity to listen to conversations that were once hidden. It also offers influencers an opportunity to amplify their message for good or ill. Much is made of the epidemiology model of Social marketing and “going viral.”
• Mobile is a technology rather than a channel but display ads in mobile need to be very different in appearance and in management to display ads on a computer screen. Because mobile devices move around in the real world they provide a great platform for location specific advertising such as “where’s the nearest coffee shop?”

So that’s the syllabus: a walkthrough of the key characteristics of digital marketing channels from an analytics perspective. And here is your homework assignment. If you have a Facebook account open your browser to the following URL:

 https://graph.facebook.com/<ID>
 where you replace <ID> with your Facebook ID. If you don’t have a Facebook ID you can use mine, which is Kquant.
 <a target="_blank" mce_href="https://graph.facebook.com/kquant" href="https://graph.facebook.com/kquant">https://graph.facebook.com/kquant </a>

You should see something like the following:

 {
 “id”: “767558617”,
 “name”: “Kevin Geraghty”,
 “first_name”: “Kevin”,
 “last_name”: “Geraghty”,
 “link”: “http://www.facebook.com/kquant”,
 “username”: “kquant”,
 “gender”: “male”,
 “locale”: “en_US”
 }

It’s just one slice of the massive amounts of machine accessible data moving online for you to analyze. Let me know if there are particular aspects you would like me to focus on. Hope you enjoy.

As vice president of Reporting and Analytics for 360i, Kevin Geraghty (KGeraghty@360i.com) is responsible for delivering data-driven insights that enhance marketers’ business results. He has received honors from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for outstanding Operations Research practice and serves as editor-in-chief for INFORMS Online.