Making business decisions without good data to back it up is simply guessing. We know that metrics are a requirement in our daily lives, but are we using the data we need or just the data we have access to? As they relate to an advertising campaign, metrics help track campaign activity in order to effectively plan, implement, and evaluate both current and future campaigns. With digital advertising, campaign owners can track and optimize exposure, response, and overall effectiveness of ad campaigns. Digital advertising offers the opportunity for marketers and agencies to easily gather these metrics so that they can better evaluate and understand ad campaigns.

This data becomes even more critical when course correction is required to improve campaign performance in-flight, as both marketers and agency partners must be able to make strategic decisions based off a single source of truth. While these metrics are currently available, gathering all of these metrics that live in disparate places to create actionable insights is very labor-intensive for brands. Simply having the data for each of the stages of a campaign life cycle in one platform makes these insights easier to be applied to campaigns in-flight and in the future.

At comScore, we’ve partnered with numerous clients to provide a solution (comScore Digital Analytics®) that decreases manual reconciliation, provides any team within an organization with data where it’s wanted and needed, and allows raw data to be ingested so that specific metrics don’t have to be determined before putting that data into a platform for actionable insights to be learned.

Based upon the work we’ve done with clients such as Kellogg’s, we’ve pulled together three key ways this sort of solution can help optimize ad strategies through the combination of disparate data sets:

1. Decrease the time spent manually parsing data and running reports
When advertisers and their agencies run campaigns across a brand portfolio, media plans often consist of many disparate sets of third-party data including metrics from display, search, social and video advertising sources as well as any pre-testing, in-flight audience measurement and post campaign analysis. With all these data sources scattered across a multitude of ad platforms and formats, even simple performance analysis can be cumbersome and extremely time-consuming.

A platform-based digital analytics solution that has the ability to ingest raw data provides an environment where various kinds of data collected by marketing teams can be consolidated and analyzed. This flexibility allows all types of data, such as sales, customer, etc. – whether it’s comScore data or from other third-party solutions – to be analyzed within one comprehensive solution. Because the tool houses and manages all of the raw data, it removes the manual, labor-intensive process of reconciling data from multiple sources through the enterprise.

2. Identify new KPIs at any time
When solutions force clients into pre-determining metrics, they have very little flexibility to make changes later down the road, which is both unrealistic and frustrating for companies that have ever-changing business needs and goals. A digital analytics solution that leverages raw data enables a brand to determine their desired reporting metrics at the time of analysis, and ensures that the tool can grow with the brand as their metrics needs change over time.

3. Get more robust insights
Every solution should provide actionable insights, but with the addition of data from across the enterprise, brands have access to a previously untapped data resource. Once ingested into the tool, previously siloed data sets can provide deeper insights by completing the data picture. For example, sales data could be combined with customer and web analytics data to deliver valuable insights into customer profiles, trends, and behaviors that were previously unknown. Brands can leverage existing data in new ways, resulting in new and more robust insights.

For example, Kellogg’s, through working with comScore Digital Analytix, was able to collect all these metrics in a single place, which makes assessing performance both easier and faster. With a single, comprehensive view of campaign metrics, brands can identify what is and isn’t working to improve their digital advertising campaigns. Data is a powerful insights tool, but it must be well managed to help create the most effective digital ad strategies.