Transforming the Digital Past to a Customer Future

For five years a tsunami of digital metrics, measurement and data has washed across marketing departments. All of this driven by the rampant expansion of consumer digital devices and the rapid increase of online activity. As analysts, we've eagerly plunged into these deep waters. We cobbled together rafts of insight from measurement frameworks and sustained ourselves on click-through rates and engagement.

And now, a new era of impact has arrived. An era driven by the customer and the clear creation of business value.

What was large waves of noisy data, paltry in meaning will now gain shape and structure around one thing: The customer. Consider this example of what analysts said then compared to what they can say now:

Then: We are seeing 5 times more clickthroughs on paid search at Bing vs Google.

Now: People who are exhibiting "lost" behavior on our site tend to come from Google around these keywords while those arriving from Bing go directly to product pages. Further 15% of them eventually convert.

The difference is the customer framing around behavior which provides prescriptive information as opposed to the old descriptions of what happened by channel, device, or campaign. If you are still trying to figure out why your reports do not provide insights then consider this customer-behavior approach.

This change has great impact because it combines bottom-up behavior with top-down crisp customer IDs. It's akin to slicing the ocean into smaller seas of meaning. Within each customer sea we can dive further into campaign response, channel response, and message response because now we are framing the data around people first.

Looking five years forward, our seas will become even smaller, richer lakes of customer data. We know more about who they are, when and where they are when they seek information, their value to the business, as well as their real-time revenue-driving potential. Correspondingly, we trigger messages that respond well to their fluid needs. We see unified customers. We strive not to sell them product but to make their lives easier.

This premise, to make people's lives easier through data while delivering real business value, is the promise of digital data. It's where we been headed all along. Encouraging and enabling this transformation is why we founded Ambition Data and why we are so keen on this bright future.