B2B Conversations: Happy Marketer, Part 6 – Future of Analytics

Our nine-part B2B Conversation with Prantik Mazumdar, Rachit Dayal, and David Liem of SEO & Social Media agency Happy Marketer goes on.

We talked about analytics in Part Five, and now here’s part six: it’s time to look ahead to its future.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview are the personal views of the interviewees and and do not necessarily represent the philosophies or viewpoints of their organization or clients.

 (Anol Bhattacharya – AB, Prantik Mazumdar – PM, Rachit Dayal – RD, and David Liem – DL)

AB: Doesn’t mean somebody is doing that and you know what is coming up next. What is on your wish-list for social and web analytics?

RD: Are we in a conference? We should use words like RTB.

PM: First things first, I hope and wish that Singapore companies start thinking digital first, not because I’m from the industry, because I think digital allows you to do a lot more testing.

On offline once you print an ad in Straits Times, it’s tomorrow’s rubbish and it is very expensive rubbish. On digital I can experiment with smaller budgets and I think in Singapore, from what I understand from IAB, they only spend from 8-10% of their advertising budget on digital.

I hope now that changes and I would like to see, to be honest, I don’t think digital alone is the solution. Ultimately a lot of things happen in the real world so I would like to see a lot of integration of digital, especially social, with real life activities. Social integrated with real life events. Because that’s when I think the magic happens.

DL: Well, I’m encouraged seeing like Facebook recently revamped their insights page. It used to be very, very difficult to navigate and that’s given a lot of opportunities to third party analytics vendors.

I do wish that getting data would be a lot easier – to retrieve and to present. The scenario that we always face is that we’re probably presenting the analytics live, the dashboard live to our clients and I would like to see the interface be able to work with us as we go progress through our meeting as all these questions – this particular channel had more conversions.

Let’s deep dive into that, so the dashboard and the interface should be able to accommodate these very off-the-cuff requests and be able to retrieve that information really quickly. I think that’s going to be the key on making sure that these analytics tools become used more and more.

It’s just the speed and ease of finding the information rather than just the depth of the information. I think ease of use and speed to retrieve the information should be something that will help me.

RD: I think we’ve spoken about the story-telling element like simplifying the story, but that’s, ok, every quarter. On a daily basis I think people need a more comprehensive view of the channels which we talked about.

I need to understand what social does, what these platforms do and so that means multi-device and multi-channel analytics in one platform because its too complicated to go to social bakers for something and GA for something.

So pulling that together, but the challenge with that is its very hard inventing from scratch.

I think Google or someone with thought leadership needs to go into verticals and do that. Give us a dashboard for B2B tech. Give us a dashboard for education and just simplify things a little. I mean, it’s the starting point for years of development but nobody right now is thinking in terms of industry and every marketing manager has to start from scratch.

They have enough features. We don’t need more right now. We need more education and simplification.

AB: I still don’t understand why Google hasn’t started a social analytics branch yet. Every company uses Google to do their analytics, to do buzzword search, so why isn’t Google doing it?

PM: They are focused on Google Plus. Maybe they’ll do it once that becomes successful.

RD: The year Google Plus launched, the environment in Mountain View changed so much. DL and I were there for 2 consecutive years. One year was chill with cycles and free food everywhere and then Facebook suddenly looks like it’s doing well and they put Google Plus together and they all freaked out.

Everybody is working 70 hours trying to create their own network and so the last few years there really has been a fire under their chairs.

AB: Google Plus – I only know 1 dedicated person who will do anything, use anything that Google produces. He’s the only dedicated Google Plus user.

In Part Seven: the ins and outs of digital marketing and how it compares with traditional methods.