Understanding Data in Marketing

The Importance of Data

• Data is crucial for understanding customer behavior, identifying trends, optimizing strategies, and achieving marketing goals.
• Modern businesses collect, manage, and apply data to their operations to deeply understand their customers, optimize their processes, personalize their offerings, and improve their performance.
• It is vital to adhere to responsible data practices, ethical values, and privacy regulations.

Three Types of Data

• First-party data is collected directly from a company's customers or audience through cookies and other applications on their website. It includes customer demographics, purchase history, website behavior, preferences, and contact information.
• Second-party data is first-party data of another organization or business, shared or purchased through a partnership. This allows businesses to access valuable insights and reach a broader audience.
• Third-party data is collected by external sources not directly affiliated with a particular business. It includes information about consumer behaviors, interests, demographics, and online activities.

Data Lakes

• Data Lakes are customizable, general-purpose data stores where information is saved in its original format. By placing data in the Lake, it becomes available for analysis by everyone in the organization.
• Data Lakes are usually formed with a Hadoop cluster.
• Data Lakes solve the issue of needing to transform data into a variety of formats before analysis, by leaving the information intact and minimally-structured.
• Data Lakes enhance data collection and storage, but present new issues regarding security and access control, data quality, and governance.

Third-Party Data and Analytics

• Web Analytics, an example of first-party data, provides data on what is happening in the organization's website.
• Most organizations need data that goes beyond their website, such as competitive and industry information.
• Google Analytics provides anonymous benchmark data to compare website performance against others in similar industries.
• Third-party data aggregators gather behavioral data of audience members from online publishers and portals, repackaging and reselling them to other organizations.
• Third-party data aggregators provide data collection scripts for publishers to run on their sites, allowing them to collect data as part of an ad network or revenue share agreement.
• They also provide third-party cookie lists for sale to advertisers and agencies, which are used for ad targeting.

Web Data Collection Issues

• Users in Web Analytics platforms are not identical to people. Users are cookie values, and an accurate count of Web users is not the same as actual users.
• Web Analytics can no longer capture the variety of traffic produced by the customer's journey.
• Meaningful information is hard to isolate due to the excessive amount of data generated.
• There is no consensus on the right metrics for consumer activities on the Web.

Combining First and Third-Party Data Case Study: The Informatica.com Data Lake

• A Data Lake holds vast amounts of raw data until it is needed.
• Building a modern data warehouse is expensive and doesn't have a high success rate, making Data Lakes more attractive.
• Website and Web Analytics should be set up to connect with the Data Lake to improve the quality of analytics and uncover actionable insights.

Digital Advertising Types

• Modern technology has changed the way consumers purchase products and services online.