Survey Says: Time to Get Your Analytics House in Order

A recent study indicated that 85% of marketers worldwide are feeling greater pressure to measure the business value of their marketing efforts. Recent research by Accenture revealed that CMOs anticipate analytics skills becoming a core competency of marketing. As marketing organizations are increasingly focused on becoming more data-driven, digital analytics will play an integral role in this transformation from intuition-driven decision making to data-centered decision making. What is the state of your digital analytics program? Is it sufficiently equipped and prepared to support your marketing organization on its new data journey? It’s now a crucial time to get your digital analytics house in order.

During my time at Omniture/Adobe, I’ve had the opportunity to meet with all kinds of companies at various stages in their digital analytics maturity. When I was working with these firms in Adobe Consulting, I identified several key factors that contributed to building a successful, data-driven organization. I assembled these factors into a digital governance framework that has helped companies to evolve, improve, and grow their digital analytics programs. Based on this framework, I also launched an online survey that asked respondents to evaluate their organizations’ current capabilities.

After launching the survey more than two years ago, I’ve collected more than 300 responses (up until last December). Even though I have shared some insights from this survey in a few presentations, I’ve never published my findings more broadly. As I’ve noticed an increase in interest in analytics governance over the last 12 months, I thought it would be a good time to take a more in-depth look at what this survey revealed.

• Executive sponsorship: 51% of respondents reported having either a C-level or VP-level executive sponsor for their digital analytics program. It’s encouraging that only 16% reported having no executive sponsor at all. Executive sponsorship is critical to the success of any digital analytics program. Often failing programs need look no further than the lack of an effective executive sponsor.
• Management buy-in: Approximately a third (34%) of those surveyed felt like their management team consistently supported their digital analytics program. The rest of the individuals indicated that they received management support on an inconsistent or rare basis. If the executive sponsor was a C-level exec or VP, the level of management buy-in was two-to-three times greater than those with just a manager or director-level sponsor.
• Accountability: One of the most concerning findings was that only 9% felt their entire organization was accountable to digital metrics. The size of the organization appeared to be an influential factor as 50% of the fully accountable firms had only 1-250 employees. Until accountability is taken seriously, being “data-driven” will only be a superficial label at best. It’s less about punishing or rewarding people based on their performance and more about learning and improving as an organization over time.
• Strategy clarity: Twenty-nine percent of the respondents said their online goals and KPIs were unclear. Another 47% indicated that their online strategy either needed to be updated or was being misinterpreted. Only 24% of the respondents had a clear, up-to-date online strategy that was being owned by their management team.
• Reporting alignment: Only 15% felt their digital analytics reports closely matched their business needs and were being used on a regular basis. At the other end of the spectrum, 10% saw their current digital data as mostly irrelevant. Misalignment can creep into reporting over time if it isn’t managed properly. That’s why more agile implementation techniques such as tag management as well as recurring report auditing are critical to your success. They will ensure your digital data continues to deliver value after your initial implementation is complete.
• Training investment: When it came to training most organizations received a failing grade. More than a third (36%) reported that users received no training at all. Another 31% indicated that some ad hoc training occurred, but it depended on the manager or department. Only 8% had comprehensive training programs in place for digital analytics.
• Staffing needs: One of the survey questions asked people to gauge how well staffed their digital analytics teams were in terms of meeting their business needs. The vast majority of respondents indicated there was a fairly large gap in this area. Thirty-six percent stated they had between 0-20% of their staffing needs. Another 21% was in the 21-40% range of staffing needs. Only 14% indicated that they had 71-100% of the digital analytics talent they needed.
• Data democratization: Approximately two-thirds of the respondents (67%) reported being highly dependent on analysts to answer even just basic questions. Only 13% felt that users were sufficiently empowered to run with the data entirely on their own. Not surprisingly, the lack of training appeared to contribute significantly to the high dependency on analyst support. Seventy-two percent of the companies that struggled the most with data democratization offered no product training.

The findings from this survey indicate there’s still a lot of work to be done in laying a surer foundation that will support the data-driven needs of digital marketers. In fact, 58% of the respondents rated their digital analytics program as a 5 or less on a 10-point scale (1=weak, 10=strong). Hopefully, as data-centric CMOs and other marketing executives seek to “walk the talk,” they will invest the necessary time, headcount, and training to take their digital analytics programs to the next level.

If you’re interested in learning more about my digital governance framework, you can download a free copy of my “How to Create a Data-Driven Dynasty” whitepaper. It explores the different key factors that contribute to creating a data-driven organization. In addition, I’d also recommend checking out Adobe’s Capability-Maturity Self-Assessment Tool for digital analytics that provides you with useful benchmark scores for how you’re doing compared to peers in your same industry. There’s no time like the present to start identifying gaps in your digital analytics house and address them before your competitors fix theirs.

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