A tale of 2 digital analysts

Today I am introducing you to James and Natalie. They are both marketing analysts, working within large teams that service demanding stakeholders for digital performance insights.

James

James starts work at around 8am on Tuesday. He has built a pretty automated series of online dashboards that pull data from Google Analytics. With a few clicks, he has access to updated data for traffic & engagement KPIs.

After interacting with the dashboard controls for 20', he spots a spike in Direct traffic which seems concerning. It had actually started on Thursday but he hadn't seen the dashboards, as he had to prepare for a management meeting on Monday. Now he is quite nervous, knowing that Direct traffic probably means there is an error - somewhere!

He rushes to Google Analytics to start analyzing. Tries a breakdown by device and notices that the uplift is mostly on mobile. Then turns to landing page, and there it is! Traffic is landing on the Christmas Sale page - this looks bad, it seems that some marketing activity went live untracked.

Now management will not have any granular data to assess & optimize the campaign - it's basically a waste of money, as attribution modelling won’t work, and media mix will not be optimized. Retargeting audiences will not get properly activated either, and for this business these deliver 2x conversions than cold audiences 😞. It's a marketing nightmare, which has cost roughly $20k in the last 4 days!

He opens Teams to reach out to the social team. Based on the campaign calendar, and the mobile concentration, it should be the Instagram campaign that went live a few days ago. It's now almost 2pm as he had to deliver a couple of reports, and attend a few meetings, while exploring the Direct issue. The social manager is offline, he is still down with Covid.

James manages to find the new associate who confirms on the spot that the links that were used, do not include any tracking parameters. It just dropped off the to-do list as the campaign got finalized last minute, as usual. It's now 4pm on Tuesday and James is quite happy that at least he managed to get to the bottom of the error within less than a week!

Natalie

Enter Natalie.

Natalie uses Baresquare. Since she signed up for automated KPI monitoring, she stopped using dashboards to stay on top of performance fluctuations. Instead, she receives daily alerts for anomalies detected in web metrics.

Natalie is amazed by the "follow up analysis" feature, which does everything that *she* would do, as an expert digital analyst, to identify issues such as untracked campaigns or bot traffic. The "monetary impact" feature helps her prioritize actions based on the greatest opportunity loss.

Last Thursday, the system spotted an untracked campaign and alerted the marketing team’s group address. By the time Natalie went to the office, it had already been resolved! Natalie is so happy with "Baresquare for web metrics", now she is expanding into "Baresquare for campaigns" (that creates alerts for campaign performance), and "Baresquare for SEO" (that surfaces fluctuations in user searches, problems with tags or page speed etc.).

Sound familiar?

Of course James and Natalie are made up characters. But James’ experience is painfully familiar, we've seen marketing analysts struggle with this reality hundreds of times! In today's data landscape, building one more dashboard will not solve a lot. What the industry needs is automated monitoring & action triggering. So that more analysts are cool like Natalie, not overwhelmed like James! Natalie has the time, and peace of mind, to run deep-dive analyses, stay on top of industry trends, or propose strategic, value-add projects to management - after taking the repetitive analyst work out of her daily routine.

Act fast with Baresquare

At Baresquare, our vision is to be the action engine. If you work with tons of digital marketing data, let's connect. Book a demo and learn what Baresquare can do for you.

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