While web analytics companies had fallen out of favor with their burdensome plethora of datasets and a marketer's inability to spare the time to digest it all, the latest trend is to provide integrated dashboards that marries most of the online and offline transactions together so that marketers can make meaningful purchase decisions with respect to advertising and campaign spends. This is a snake eating its tail. But, what purveyors of web analytics do not tell you is that there isn't a single solution available that is an actual standalone single solution.
By standalone, I mean to say that there isn't a single dashboard entity that has all the necessary tools under its own dashboard. It may show up in the UI as a single utility, but it is the merger of several tools from different providers each of whom you have to purchase to use.
The secret sauce that has everyone whispering about at conferences and marketing webinars this year is how to combine online data transactions with offline data transactions so that marketers can better understand online marketing, retention efforts, create more targeted advertising, and ultimately generate higher conversions.
Customers interact with your company and its brands everywhere:
- Twitter, Facebook
- Via mobile phone, Skype, or call centers
- In-store kiosks (Starbucks, bank branches, photo duplication, etc.)
- Brick and mortar stores
- Print publications (magazines, newspapers, flyers, postcards, POS)
- On the web
