How important is it for e-Commerce businesses to capture marketing analytics in real time? What does “real time” technically mean? Is it just another marketing buzz term destined to lose its luster, or a new “must have” in the rapidly evolving landscape of digital marketing?
In a world where online consumers can now buy products anytime and anywhere from all manner of devices, businesses need to be able to respond fast and adapt their marketing strategies based on what’s happening in the moment. A tweet mentioning your product, a news story, or even a change in the weather can prompt an uptick in demand. Taking advantage of these opportunities demands access to “fresh” data, making a very strong case for the importance of real-time analytics.
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What real time really means. There is some debate going on about how long the time delay can be between data being generated and data being accessible for analysis in order for it to be defined as real time. And realistically, a little lag time (seconds or even minutes) is acceptable, as long as the data is accurate and actionable the moment that it is delivered. E-Commerce businesses should be able to use the information they are capturing to refine and adjust marketing campaigns as they are happening. Information that arrives once a campaign has ended is not nearly as valuable. Seasonal sales, for example, are inherently time sensitive. If an offer is not showing the expected percentage of conversions, real-time data can help a business identify problems to address before it’s too late. For instance, catching and fixing a technical glitch in a landing page link for a shoe discount offer can make all the difference between a successful campaign or a wasted investment.
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Be selective. As the volume of information available for businesses to analyze continues to explode, beware of gorging yourself on data. Just because something can be analyzed doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be analyzed. There’s no need to capture metrics on 20 to 30 different variables when looking at two or three will tell you what you need to know. Too much data can be overwhelming and lead to “analysis paralysis” for marketers. Before engaging real-time analytics, it’s important to have a game plan. Think carefully about what you want to measure, identify the metrics that really matter to the success of your campaign and concentrate on those.
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Be patient. This may sound counterintuitive when it comes to real-time analytics, but it also is important to give your campaigns some time to reveal useful insights. For example, the real-time data coming in within seconds or even a few minutes of an e-Commerce campaign being launched may not give an accurate assessment of how well things are working overall. While it’s critical to capture this information, often performance data needs to be analyzed across a specified time period in order to identify key patterns. A campaign that appears to be bombing at the outset may just need some time to build momentum, so be careful of making snap judgments based on incomplete information.
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Technology. Technology is an essential component of real-time analytics. In the past, businesses were limited by the available technologies for gathering and analyzing data, which were often historical in scope. Today, marketers can use tracking and attribution technology to see, in real time, how a campaign or offer is performing, how many people are viewing it, how many are clicking and how many are buying — and even drill down to attribute which specific channels, strategies or affiliates are having the greatest impact. For brands with thousands of product lines and SKUs, this is a real game-changer. For instance, Atlantic Coast Media Group, an online purveyor of multiple beauty brands, tracks all of its affiliate sales in real time. This data allows the company to analyze which affiliates are delivering the best leads by product, so that it can modify its marketing spend and even customize the types of offers it gives to each affiliate — ultimately optimizing performance and ROI. This is the power of real time in action.
Unlike other passing marketing buzzwords and fads, “real time” is the real deal. With the right technology and strategy in place, e-Commerce businesses can take advantage of real-time analytics to increase the power of their marketing spend.
As CTO and founder of CAKE, Dave Stewart oversees research and development for the company’s marketing technology products. He manages a talented team of engineers, in support of current customer needs as well as ongoing product innovation. Dave has spent much of the past decade architecting software and is an expert in systems architecture, front- and back-end web technologies, database design and development, cloud infrastructure and complex UX design.
