Love your data: online advertising and web analytics integration

Spring is in the air – the birds are chirp­ing; the flow­ers are bloom­ing; and friends, fam­i­lies, and cou­ples are pic­nick­ing in full force. Love is, as they say, in the air.

But how much love are you show­ing your data?

It’s com­mon knowl­edge in the dig­i­tal indus­try that suc­cess in busi­ness hinges upon a strong foun­da­tion of data. It’s what enables you to mea­sure returns, bench­mark suc­cess, iden­ti­fy trends, set bud­gets, and on. And most of us have invest­ed time and mon­ey in imple­ment­ing a robust data plat­form to serve our businesses.

If you’ve cho­sen Adobe Ana­lyt­ics, and either have Adobe Media Opti­miz­er or are con­sid­er­ing it, there are sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits to using the two togeth­er, but you might not realise just how pow­er­ful these two solu­tions com­bined can be.

1. See the Full Con­ver­sion Fun­nel & Use It to Make Gains on Optimisation

Typ­i­cal­ly in track­ing paid dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing, we see the click (along­side impres­sion, cost, aver­age posi­tion, and CPC). Then there’s a big black hole. Then there’s (hope­ful­ly) a con­ver­sion with all its aspects.

But what hap­pened in between? And why have we as dig­i­tal mar­keters accept­ed not know­ing what’s going on between click and con­ver­sion for so long?

Well, if you’ve got Adobe Ana­lyt­ics and Media Opti­miz­er, you’ve got that visibility.

The impact of lever­ag­ing this data you already have in your PPC is mul­ti-fold. It means you have a much more robust pic­ture of every keyword’s per­for­mance, so both you and the bid­ding algo­rithm are more informed of the val­ue of each key­word to your busi­ness. It means you have more data to work with­in the con­text of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of bid mod­i­fiers, which has cre­at­ed an issue of data scarci­ty – each key­word now requires more data behind it to be able to intel­li­gent­ly and accu­rate­ly deci­sion bids across dimen­sions like mobile, geo, and audi­ence. And it means there’s also more infor­ma­tion to go off of for long-tail and gener­ic key­words that might not get clicks very often or that might be high­er up the con­ver­sion fun­nel and have a bit of opac­i­ty around their con­tri­bu­tion to the ulti­mate con­ver­sion down the line.

Adobe Media Optimizer’s algo­rithm team did exten­sive analy­sis, and select­ed the five most sig­nif­i­cant on-site engage­ment met­rics to bake into their mas­ter equation.

Once our cus­tomers lever­aged the inte­gra­tion, they saw an aver­age of 16% high­er ROI and 15% more con­vert­ing key­words. Per­son­al­ly, in my for­mer life as an AMO Account Man­ag­er, I’ve seen upwards of 24% uplift on some clients.

Essen­tial­ly, if you’ve got Adobe Ana­lyt­ics, you can get the data you already have dri­ving more mon­ey for your busi­ness in paid adver­tis­ing by lever­ag­ing the inte­gra­tion with Adobe Media Optimizer.

2. Use Ana­lyt­ics Con­ver­sion Met­rics to Define What You Opti­mise Towards

Users of Adobe Media Opti­miz­er already know they can cre­ate robust cus­tom busi­ness objec­tives to attach to their Search, Social, and Dis­play port­fo­lios so they can define what is valu­able for their paid dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing to chase.

Adver­tis­ers who also have Adobe Ana­lyt­ics can take that cus­tomi­sa­tion to the next lev­el, pulling in any oth­er con­ver­sion met­rics they deem rel­e­vant that can be linked back to a click. This means the bid­ding algo­rithm will under­stand exact­ly what results you’re inter­est­ed in chas­ing, and not just a blan­ket ROI fig­ure or a gener­ic ‘max­imise orders’ command.

It also means the met­rics you’re chas­ing and the data you’re using is the same as the wider busi­ness. That puts your results in the con­text of the wider busi­ness, mak­ing it eas­i­er to demon­strate rel­e­vance and impact.

Paid dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing isn’t inde­pen­dent of your business’s over­all mar­ket­ing, and its data shouldn’t be, either.

3. Ana­lyt­ics Data is Vis­i­ble Side-by-Side with Search Data in AMO

Speak­ing of con­text, those Adobe Ana­lyt­ics met­rics you’re lever­ag­ing in Media Opti­miz­er are also view­able right next to the rest of your data – right down to the key­word level.

This means your teams man­ag­ing your Search, Social, and Dis­play activ­i­ty can take advan­tage of rich­er data with­out hav­ing to learn the ins and outs of Adobe Ana­lyt­ics or ever dive into that part of the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Cloud. There is no extra effort on their part to have you get more out of your Ana­lyt­ics data. You just get more.

4. Deep-Dive Direct­ly in Analytics

The inte­gra­tion between Ana­lyt­ics and Media Opti­miz­er is two-way. That means you can deep-dive through your SEM account hier­ar­chy, for exam­ple, all the way down to the key­word lev­el direct­ly in Analytics.

In addi­tion, with your paid dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing data in Ana­lyt­ics, you can slice, dice, and analyse it just like you would any­thing else you’re mon­i­tor­ing through the plat­form. This includes anom­aly detec­tion, con­tri­bu­tion analy­sis, and the drag and drop analy­sis work­space that cre­ates reports on the fly.

By hav­ing the data in both parts of the Cloud, you’re not only enrich­ing your paid ad per­for­mance, but also get­ting more val­ue out of Ana­lyt­ics, with even more data to work with for the wider business.

5. Inte­gra­tion is a Breeze

All the plumb­ing has been done on the back­end to not only make this inte­gra­tion effec­tive, but also incred­i­bly easy to set up. All that’s required is the Ana­lyt­ics report suite name and the evars to be used. In the lat­est inte­gra­tions, we’re even able to tap into evars specif­i­cal­ly des­ig­nat­ed for use by Media Opti­miz­er, so your team doesn’t have to iden­ti­fy free ones. Then it’s just a mat­ter of let­ting us know what met­rics you want to pull in. We’ll tick those box­es for you, get the track­ing para­me­ters set to add onto the urls, and that’s it.

You’ll have the data flow­ing between the two plat­forms and will be able to get more out of your data on both sides.

So why not get the data you already have work­ing hard­er by team­ing Adobe Ana­lyt­ics up with Adobe Media Opti­miz­er? You’ll get incre­men­tal returns for no addi­tion­al invest­ment in your data platform.

Now that’s a whole lot­ta ROI love.