Complication – A major, consumer packaged goods company had a global portfolio of digital marketing properties that numbered in the thousands. Percent of marketing spend allocated to digital marketing was increasing year-over-year, yet measurement of the effectiveness of that spend remained problematic due to poor and inconsistent tracking implementations. Approaches to web analytics governance had been defined, but enforcement was infeasible given the distributed nature of the organization, and the lack of a technology solution to inspect and report on thousands of short-lifecycle, promotional sites which were developed by hundreds of different agencies. Approach – The Aspirent team approached the problem leveraging a combination of our Information Management and Application Development capabilities:
- The first step in our approach was to collect and examine data from existing systems that would give a picture of the total portfolio of websites. A single master database of existing properties simply did not exist.
- The second step was to develop and informComplication – A large beverage company wanted deeper insights and a method to understand the relationships that existed between their brand and social media. Aspirent linked their Brand Health, Consumption and Online Search metrics, and measurable Social and Traditional Media activity (social media impressions, digital news posts, forum conversation sentiment, and more) to provide a sentiment analysis to enact marketing strategies. Approach – The Aspirent team approached the problem in a 5 step approach:
- Collected longitudinal consumption, online search, and digital social & traditional media data, including weekly impressions, “buzz”, posts, sentiment, and passion metrics, across Brand Topics, Themes (advertising, events, taste, sustainability, and Media sources (Blogs, Forums, Consumer reports, Social media, etc.). This required tracking over 80 data variables across brands and themes.
- Measured bivariate correlations between groups of metrics to determine the strongest data relationships. For example, if Forum Buzz Posts and Total Buzz are 90% correlated, then only one was chosen to represent the concept of “Buzz.”
- Suggested a reduction of the data dimension to a more manageable subset of metrics, using Factor or Principal Component-type analyses. Identified an optimal number of “components”, or groups of variables representing a factor (concept), to explain most of the variability in this media data. We did this within each theme, for the Brand(s) of interest to the Client.
- Explored the relationships between these components/metrics and target variables, such as consumption and search data, to understand what predictive or explanatory power may be present, through correlations and graphical techniques.
- Recommended an appropriate method for explaining, through statistical modeling, the multivariate relationships that existed among the social media data.
Results
- The project proved there were measurable relationships within Social Media Data, Traditional Media Data, and the Google Search data relevant to the Client.
- Conversation around Boycott, Known Campaigns, and Social/Inclusiveness, and Twitter Shares, trend especially closely with search data related to the Client as a brand.
- Advertising, Boycott, Consumption, Sponsored Events, Brand Campaigns, Taste, and Social/Inclusiveness themes generally show strongest correlations at the weekly level between Social and Google Search data – relationships consistent across multiple brands.
- Total Buzz & Unique Posts are essentially one in the same. Other social/media metrics can be used as proxies for entire groups of data, reducing the data volume by over 50% with virtually no loss of information.
ation model and cloud-hosted database that would serve to simplify the real-world complexities of identifying the improperly tracked websites amongst a constantly changing portfolio of active sites.
- The Aspirent team next created a customized web crawler process to perform daily scans of the complete set of global web properties to capture reachability status, URL redirections, actual tracking tags in use on the site, and nearly 20 other observable attributes of each site.
- Armed with real, current data, the team then engaged with Aspirent’s premier UX Partner (Expand The Room) to create the visual design for an intuitive, actionable compliance dashboard which could be distributed to marketing executives in each market unit.
- Finally, the Aspirent team, using Tableau, developed the dashboard from the visual design.
Results For the first time, Marketing had an effective tool for understanding the current state of their web properties globally, and the availability (or unavailability) of quality analytics data for each site.
- Marketing leadership could easily observe the scale of the analytics data gap.
- Improperly tracked websites were easily identifiable by business owners, as well as the corrective actions required to comply with corporate tracking policy.
- Tracking policy enforcement was effectively gamified through the visual design of the dashboard, which led to accelerated reduction of non-compliant sites.