Aiming to be proactive in your work is something that you can easily declare, but is complicated to execute. Having the right tools would help you a lot in getting on the fast track.
“AI-driven, proactive analytics can open up a whole new depth of marketing projects, giving you the ability to make better decisions faster”, explains Gavin England, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adverity. In the latest Adverity Bitesize webinar, he gives an overview of augmented analytics, what it is, and how it can help you as a marketer.
Taking the smartphone as a starting point, Gavin talks about how it has become one of the most important things we own, especially when it comes to managing our lives. When he lost his phone in Paris one time, he realized he’d failed to activate the “find my phone” feature. It would have proactively revealed its exact location on a map of the city, making it easier to recover the phone, and that’s the power of proactive technology, he explains.
A Way to Find a Needle in a Haystack
Finding a lost tiny smartphone in a huge city is very similar to the challenge modern marketers face, attempting to find critical intelligence within the huge piles of performance data available to them, says Gavin. “It’s really difficult, even with an army of analysts and data scientists.”
Augmented analytics uses enabling technologies, such as machine learning and AI, to help with data preparation, insight generation and explanation, automating many aspects of data science. This means augmented analytics can provide insights immediately and proactively, Gavin explains.
The Nuts and Bolts of AI-powered Analytics
Gavin explains how augmented analytics works in marketing. Firstly, it takes a huge amount of campaign data, across all channels you are using, gathers it together and harmonizes it, so it can make more sense out of it. It then applies sophisticated algorithms to assess the mass of information, learn from it, and understand the complex patterns within it - in great detail.
“Augmented analytics uses these learnings to automatically find the most critical insights for you, proactively presenting them in an unbiased, meaningful, and easy-to-understand way,” says Gavin. It means marketers can quickly and easily gain insights themselves, without waiting for input coming from data science specialists or analysts.
3 Major Advantages of Augmented Analytics
There are three major benefits of using augmented analytics in your daily operations: it uncovers deep insights which are difficult to find through conventional analysis methods; it automates analysis to provide answers which would take far longer to find otherwise; and it presents predictive recommendations on where to best focus your resources.
Anomaly and Trend Detection
One of the main benefits of AI-powered analytics tools is that they can intelligently learn from large amounts of historical KPI data, and use it to identify sudden deviations and hidden trends, unearthing issues that might have otherwise been missed. For marketers, this could be a drop-in engagement rate, indicating unsuccessful ad creatives. Or ROI increasing in a certain market, indicating greater brand awareness there.
Segment Analysis
Keeping a close eye on complex campaigns spanning over many channels and areas is tough. And this is where AI-powered algorithms come to the rescue, by automatically analyzing all possible segments within a broad, multi-channel campaign, and proactively identifying over- or underperforming ones.
This means marketers can obtain a granular analysis of the most effective segments, even the ones emerging as they execute a campaign. “You can also refine targeting, based on insights learned during the campaign, to increase engagement. Or focus budgets on specific segments to produce better results,” Gavin says.
Predictive Forecasting
Gavin also talked about how augmented analytics can learn from historical data, such as revenue and budget spend, to predict future performance and make optimization recommendations. This is crucial for strategic planning, particularly in strange circumstances, like the ones we had this year, with all the KPIs constantly changing, following the changed behavior of the customers.
Gavin ends with three snappy takeaways. First, you can use augmented analytics to optimize your marketing performance and maximize your ROI. Second, it can significantly reduce risk by ensuring that no errors or outliers get missed. And third, the automation that augmented analytics provides will dramatically decrease manual analysis effort, freeing your analysts to focus on valuable, strategic activities.
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