Datalicious

Natural Language Processing

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 04:27:04 +0000

A branch of artificial intelligence, NLP aids computers to decipher and make sense of human languages. It involves the application of algorithms to identify natural language rules, enabling unstructured data to be understood by computers.

ID: glossary

NZME

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 02:11:07 +0000

Logo: Client website: https://www.nzme.co.nz/

Andy Wylie

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 01:16:43 +0000

The NZ Herald is focused on keeping Kiwis in the know and now delivering the “next best” article recommendations with our purpose-built engine, has resulted in a more relevant and engaging experience for our audiences than the previous off-the-shelf product. It was a huge collective effort between the Google News Initiative team, Datalicious and NZME to create the engine which sits at the frontier of technology, by utilising AI, machine learning and natural language processing tools. The results have been exceptional for us, unlocking deep insights on article affinity and increasing recirculation rates for audiences. We are looking forward to working with our partners to build on our success, with future iterations of the recommendation engine.

Job Title: Head of Data & Analytics Company - Year: NZME - 2020

How to use data analytics for smart marketing now and after COVID-19

admin — Wed, 27 May 2020 05:56:13 +0000

Change is everywhere we look – not only in our daily lives but also in the way we search for and consume content. With change comes deep uncertainty, for both consumers and marketers, about the best way forward through the coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath.

Figuring out where to place your brand, how to support your customers, where to find them, and what to do to mitigate loss – these are all questions that proper data analysis can answer. From audience measurement insights and cross-platform analysis to spend optimisation and website analytics, these are some of the digital technologies helping marketers navigate onerous questions.

Importantly, 'change' must now be repositioned as 'opportunity'. In other words, take this chance to transform your business and be ready for what lies ahead. It's here that digital analytics can take the guesswork away from your efforts to adapt and replace uncertainty with certainty, and clear strategies. Here are some ways marketers can navigate through this pandemic and beyond, to build stronger customer relationships by understanding what resonates well with different audience segments.

Prioritise digital marketing maturity

If the shelving of existing projects leaves you with available bandwidth, use this as an opportunity to progress your digital marketing maturity. All too often, digital transformation projects lag behind other competing priorities, muffling a marketer's ability to gain competitive advantage by better understanding the full range of customer experiences.

Today we are ready with the strategy, innovation and resources to help you improve and accelerate this progression. Connecting online with offline data is one way we can assist - by integrating multiple tools to allow for a more holistic view of your sales funnel, so you can understand the value of your online marketing activity on offline sales.

Develop appropriate pricing strategies

Be ready to revise your pricing strategy to reflect on your customer's situation as well as changes to their perception of value. We can help you actively prepare using machine learning capabilities to demonstrate the benefits and risks of providing pricing adjustments and promotional discounts that align with shifts in consumer habits. A true understanding of the impact of today's conditions will ensure your strategic pricing strategies foster consumer confidence in your brand.

Create informed interactions

Know how to pick up on changes to consumer buying behaviours and media consumption both now and after the pandemic. Recent data shows that consumers are hanging out on digital channels more so now than ever. Some, but not all consumers, will maintain these habits when the recovery period ends. Without leveraging the right technology, it's impossible to reach out to these audiences and predict what's next.

We are working with clients right now, using data analysis to gain visibility of their audiences. By understanding and anticipating the content their customers are consuming, marketers can regulate their media strategy accordingly.

Adjust your marketing mix

It's likely your marketing and media budget is under review. Using data and analytics to evaluate your media spend will help you understand which marketing activities and channels hold the most value in the current environment and in the long term. Our clients are using our analytical services and expertise to measure the impact on sales of current events, work out how much to spend on advertising and where to spend it. In dealing with the new normal, it's vital to know how to optimise media spend to drive better business outcomes.

Project integrity and trust

Now, more than ever, it's essential to engage with customers from a position of empathy. With an in-depth knowledge of your customers' behavioural trends, you can reframe your interactions through the lens of COVID-19 and proactively take measures that support and meet their requirements. With data analysis, we can help you achieve relevant positive engagement and personalised connectivity to different types of audiences. Serving your customers appropriately during this crisis will go a long way towards building a lasting connection.

Our highly capable and scalable solutions can help businesses make faster, better decisions with short turnarounds. And while we can't be on-site with our clients, we long ago mastered the ability to solve challenges from a digital space.

As a cloud-computing service provider, we are working with marketers to demonstrate how successful analytics can provide specific, granular feedback in a continually changing environment. With the right insights, marketers can remain nimble, adapting their business roadmap to suit shifting conditions, monitoring traffic performance and understanding their users' behaviour online.

Perhaps the most potent application of data analytics during COVID-19 will be to help marketers make the shift to digital and navigate a path well beyond these difficult times. We're here to help our customers accelerate this digital transformation and growth in 2020 and beyond. To find out how we can benefit your business, contact us through Equifax Marketing Services or via our Datalicious contact form.

Tags: Coronavirus COVID-19 Data analytics Background image: Intro text:

Marketers all over the world are evaluating their marketing spend. Some have hit the pause button. Others are trying to figure out how to proceed. Many are wondering where to find their traditional audiences online.

Post type: Article

Sarah Calderwood

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 01:23:55 +0000

Datalicious have been instrumental in the development of our overall website ecosystem and strategy at Cancer Council NSW. Brian Do, Technical Consultant and Parth Vasoya, Web Analyst from Datalicious have displayed true resilience in the deployment of our solutions across very complex journeys and have become an extended part of the team. Their Google expertise have enabled us to take our data capabilities to a new level and we look forward to continuing the great work.

Job Title: Digital Marketing Manager Company - Year: Cancer Council NSW - 2019

Cancer Council NSW

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 01:16:48 +0000

Logo: Client website: https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/

Media Mix Modelling - 5 Useful Ways It Can Benefit Your Marketing

admin — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 02:06:09 +0000

If you’re serious about measuring the effectiveness of your online and offline marketing, you need to look at the historical relationship between marketing spend and business performance. And this is where Media Mix Modelling (MMM) has significant strategic value. Put in the hands of CMOs and senior marketing managers, MMM provides a foundation from which to make evidence-based decisions on how to achieve maximum return on marketing investment (ROMI).

One of these essential decisions is knowing when to cap your advertising spend because ROMI has reached its peak. By predicting this saturation point, MMM can help you optimise your profitability, aligning your budget to ensure your spend is no higher than what is likely to be recouped in revenue.

In a recent project, an Australian superannuation fund sought to understand the effectiveness of their seven media channels, including their electronic direct-to-member campaigns (eDMs) and their traditional direct-to-member mailings. The project began with Datalicious aggregating and cleansing three years’ worth of historical marketing spend and sales performance data supplied by the fund. Pairing sophisticated analytics technology with a consultative approach, the Datalicious team used MMM to measure how specific marketing stimuli had a contributing influence on sales.

Among the many findings, two eDM channels were identified as driving marketing revenue. Traditional media campaigns conducted through trade publications were found to have potential, but limited opportunity compared to other channels. On a holistic level, the project furnished the superannuation fund’s executive team with quantitative evidence about the contribution of marketing and brand to sales. They could they see which elements of campaigns were working, and how much of it was down to marketing or brand value. If the superannuation fund’s marketing efforts were switched off, MMM demonstrated how much of their sales were solely reliant on brand value.

Once a company knows what’s happening in their business, a good MMM project should recommend what to do next. In other words: here’s what to do now to improve the performance of your marketing spend. Our recommendations to the superannuation fund, for example, included the importance of targeting the right segment of customers, as we could see this would yield better returns with the same budget. Also, coupling traditional media with direct mail as a strategy to boost sales.

External influencers such as seasonality, gender, age, promotions, holidays and weather are often factored into a media mix modelling’s analytics. As such, marketers can understand the impact of each variable on sales – a crucial consideration when allocating media budgets. In a recent MMM project we conducted for a specialist toy retailer, for example, we isolated the recurring effects of the Christmas period on sales. The company’s Paid TV and Free to Air TV channels were found to be highly effective in driving sales during this period. Among our recommendations, we suggested a redesign of these channels could open the opportunity for year-round customer engagement.

Among the marketers who most benefit from MMM are those who seek to optimise their media across online and offline. Here we look at five ways that media mix modelling can help strengthen business performance and boost competitive advantage for these marketers.

Determine brand value

Your brand is greater than your products or services. What consumers think of your brand holds powerful sway over its financial value – brand equity. And this consumer perception is coloured by variables like marketing, product quality and customer service. Even external factors like seasonality and weather come into play. Media mix models incorporate these potential synergies when measuring brand value, so they don’t over attribute or under attribute success to any one variable.

For the superannuation fund, for example, it was determined that brand value drove 57% of sales. Compare this to 19% of sales attributed to marketing and 24% to macroeconomic factors. In the absence of all marketing activities, Datalicious analysis predicted the number of sales issued in the short term would drop to around 80% of the current value.

Understand channel contribution

When a marketing campaign uses multiple channels, it’s critical to measure the contribution of each channel. Which is the most effective for driving traffic and conversions?

In another example, a toy retailer frequently used more than ten channels in their campaigns, ranging from in-store promotions and high-impact displays to consumer brochures and public relations projects. With media mix modelling, they could better understand which channels and elements of their campaigns were working, which don’t and why. The analysis undertaken by Datalicious for one of their toy campaigns showed that even though video, mobile and Paid TV accounted for 22% of the marketing spend, these channels contributed less than 1% of revenue.

Compare ROI across different media

Should you continue to spend more on your marketing efforts, or should you dial it down a notch? Knowing the return on investment (ROI) for each specific channel and activity is an invaluable decision-making tool to help with better budget allocation.

It was from our recent MMM project with the toy retailer that we discovered one of its marketing activities – a consumer brochure – had reached its saturation point. This insight had vital significance as it meant the brochure’s ROI had peaked, and any effort to increase marketing spend would result in diminishing returns.

Predict expected return

Without hard facts, it’s difficult to predict the future. But with quantitative MMM insights based on past performance, it’s possible to answer all sorts of ‘what if’ questions. What if we reduced our direct mail budget and used it for video? What if we upped our spend on social media?

MMM can project the sales gains and losses expected with an increased or decreased investment in each channel. In doing so, marketers can reduce spend on ineffective channels and confirm they are using the right channels. The superannuation fund, for example, discovered through MMM that a more aggressive digital media strategy could lift sales. So could an increase in the reach and frequency of campaigns using traditional media.

Our MMM presentation included recommendations on how the superannuation fund could gain incremental dollars above what their brand already achieved from its current marketing activities. Several short-term actions aimed at improving media efficiency were found to add a 10% lift in incremental sales.

Optimise channel interactions

Understanding the contribution of each channel to sales is all very well, but what about their contribution to each other? How does your digital marketing interact with your traditional offline channels? What are the halo effects of different marketing channels? In other words, what is the overlap effect between one channel over others?

These are the questions that media mix modelling can answer. For example, a recommendation that came out of the MMM toy retailer project was to consider taking advantage of the positive impact of complementary channels. From the modelling, we could see several channels worked well in tandem. High impact toy displays and mobile advertising complemented each other. Public relations activities and paid search also showed positive sales results when used in combination.

It’s this unified view of marketing performance that helps companies like the toy retailer and the superannuation fund make informed marketing spend decisions.

To understand how MMM can help replace gut instinct with data-driven decisions, contact us for more info.

Background image: Intro text:

How do you define the economic value that marketing creates for your business? What is the right mix of marketing channels? Guesswork and intuition can be well off the mark when it comes to an understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Post type: Article

How To Use Google Cloud To Get Better Marketing Results

admin — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:36:29 +0000

Datalicious has helped many marketers use Google Cloud to scale their data and analytics capabilities and drive better business outcomes. In this article, we tell these client stories – showing how they solved their data challenges and gained a better understanding of their customers’ behaviour across multiple channels.

Identify which marketing activities drive more sales

How: by analysing complex customer journeys

To measure the contribution of your marketing efforts on sales means to truly understand what influences consumer decisions at each stage of the purchase path. With the involvement of multiple touch points as prospects move from initial consideration to active evaluation and closure, it can be challenging to pinpoint what marketing activities work and what doesn’t.

The specialist travel company, Chimu Adventures, was faced with this challenge when they tried to understand how their online marketing activities influenced offline sales. Although they were tracking user journeys for online interest and offline conversions, their data silos restricted their ability to track this decision-making process as it moved from online to offline. When someone booked a Chimu Adventures tour to South America or Antarctica through an agent or by ringing their hotline, the company had little idea which marketing channel had been most effective in driving the sale.

To gain a better understanding of the customer journey, Datalicious stitched Chimu’s disparate datasets together using Google BigQuery, a sophisticated cloud-based tool that helped identify which channels outperformed others.

Our data engineering, web analytics and consulting expertise provided Chimu Adventures with a Google Cloud summary table that included their online and offline data combined. This fast, highly scalable enterprise data warehouse is where complex datasets can be integrated, so there’s just one central platform to manage all the information. There was clear visibility as to which users browsed online, completed an enquiry and later converted.

Similarly, online educator Open Colleges wanted to understand which channels and touchpoints generated high-value leads for course enrolments. By helping Open Colleges utilise key features in Google Cloud, user IDs with lengthy expiration dates were leveraged to enable the ongoing analysis of paths throughout the entire conversion funnel.

By making the connection between all those different marketing touch points, a customised model developed by Datalicious provided Open Colleges with a clear idea of how prospects move along touchpoints from the awareness phase through to showing strong signs of action, where they intend to apply for a course. These insights enable a better understanding of which marketing activities were paying off, so they can re-design campaigns and optimise media activities appropriately.

Informed marketing decisions through meaningful insights

How: by stitching together data from different sources and linking and matching variables

Siloed and fragmented data housed across a variety of sources hinder your ability to realise its full potential. When you can’t connect how leads and customers interact with your business, it’s impossible to draw accurate connections between the data.

It was this disconnect that led a recruitment agency to seek our help. By using different internal systems for each stage of the user journey, they were unable to see which channel was more effective in bringing in candidates who were ultimately hired.

Equally, their processes weren’t set up to analyse by division, location or individual, which limited their ability to detect which recruitment agents brought in the best candidates. They wanted to understand the variables that impacted successful hiring practices, including variations between countries.

As such, we created rules when processing the data by stitching it together using Google Big Query which ultimately helped them understand and track their customer path to conversion. Google Big Query datasets were then cleaned to remove inconsistencies in naming conventions and mismatching of candidate information. In addition, by stitching users through different stages of their journey, a clear picture emerged of which channels led to more hires.

With the model developed by Datalicious, the recruitment agency was successful in closing the loop on their data silos. They now enjoy a much more cohesive picture of their customers in one central location.

Predict customer behaviour more accurately

How: by recognising important data elements that provide meaningful insights

Google Cloud capabilities allow for the development of sophisticated analytics and models that pull new and valuable insights from tonnes of data to understand consumer behaviour. Creating a clear picture of how your customers engage with your business can lead to tangible benefits, including customer acquisition, retention and growth.

For example, by analysing Chimu Adventures’ Google Analytics 360 (GA 360) data, Datalicious was able to identify search engine optimisation (SEO) as a vital marketing tool for the business. Paid search was determined to be of secondary benefit.

The recruitment specialist was another client to benefit from deep level insights. Measurement of the conversion rate by channel allowed them to compare various job-posting channels like LinkedIn and Seek. With insight into both the number of channels and the volume within each channel, they could decide where to post more jobs and which channels were best aligned to their business objectives.

Also, observations about the length of the hiring process and the variables associated with onboarding candidates have created opportunities to speed up the sales conversion cycle. Again, demonstrating how highly sophisticated analytics translate to effective business decisions.

Unify your data and manage scalability as needed

How: by using one central platform to store all your information

Access to the right information faster, efficiently and more effectively is a vital benefit of using an all-in-one platform where you can store your data in Google Big Query and visualise reports via our very own data visualisation tool, OptimaHub. Scale your data analytics capabilities without affecting speed or security, regardless of the complexity or volume of data. By unifying your data, it’s easy to share information, collaborate and make more efficient and informed decisions.

Scaling and streamlining their data were an essential consideration for the recruitment specialist. Datalicious’ solution allowed the disparate groups of data to be stitched together in one place without affecting personally identifiable information (PII). For example, applicants might have their personal information across three different systems if they had submitted their resume through LinkedIn, contacted a recruitment agent, and were ultimately hired. Datalicious used a consistent ID to link this information together in Google Big Query and visualised it via OptimaHub so the applicant would appear as a single applicant. The marketing team can then access up-to-date statistics and download reports as required. With data volumes growing exponentially, this level of visibility is vital to achieving an accurate read on customers.

Similarly, the Open Colleges marketing team can use the OptimaHub dashboard to keep track of their business objectives and optimise business outcomes. With their business objective of improving student acquisition rates, they can see the efficiency and performance of their campaigns and media activities, thus helping them to identify when to be in market and when not to be in market.

Take advantage of all the benefits from Google Cloud

These client stories are a snapshot of some of the work Datalicious has done with marketers to amplify the value they can achieve with Google Cloud. While easy to use, the cloud can be difficult to master without a careful orchestration of data and skills. Our expertise in data-driven analysis, coupled with our deep knowledge and experience of cloud services, enables us to unlock the potential of this open source platform to generate client-specific solutions.

By turning data into intelligence, our clients have been able to solve complex business challenges, attract and retain customers, optimise their processes and accelerate growth and innovation.

Speak to the Datalicious team about translating your business goals and challenges into cloud-based solutions.

Background image: Intro text:

As an innovative marketer, you would like to extract value from your growing volume of customer data, but it’s hard to get started. You’re either uncertain about which technologies are the best fit for your complex issues or don’t have the time or expertise to explore a cloud computing tool like Google Cloud.

Post type: Article

How UTM Parameters & Channel Groupings Benefit Marketers

admin — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:14:21 +0000

While you can report on traffic metrics like total site visits or traffic by channels, how well can you identify the sources of your traffic? Knowing where your leads are coming from, provides vital information about which channels and campaigns are generating more engagement and conversions.

Think about all the marketing activities you could trace back to get valuable performance insights. For example, do you know which of your social media ads is driving more traffic to your website? How well a recent guest post accounted for an increase in visitors? Whether your efforts at optimising your YouTube channel is paying off? UTM parameters and channel grouping analytics allow marketers to more effectively track and custom group these sources of website traffic and conversions.

What are UTM parameters?

UTM parameters are customisable tags added to a destination URL. When a link that contains a UTM parameter is clicked, information is sent back to Google Analytics about how the user engaged with that unique link.

Here is the difference between a standard URL and the same URL with a UTM Tag:

Standard URL

https://datalicious.com/

UTM Tagged URL

https://datalicious.com/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=googleanalytics360&salesforce

When you have a URL with a UTM tag to track how your marketing activities are performing, you can see where a lead comes from and the touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

What are channel groupings?

Channel groupings are rule-based groups of your traffic sources. Each defines to Google Analytics what channels to show based on the tags in your UTM parameters. The most commonly used parameters are your UTM ‘source’, ‘medium’ and ‘campaign’.

What does a UTM parameter help you identify?

UTM parameters help make it easier for you as a marketer to gain more insight about your users as they interact with your content. To help you do this, the most common types of parameters you can add to your URLs are described below.

utm_source - identifies where the link originates from, such as the search engine, newsletter, blog, LinkedIn or Facebook.
utm_medium - shows which marketing channels bring visitors to your website, such as email or social. The medium is a general / broader category of a source, so if the source is Facebook or Instagram, then the medium would be social for both.
utm_campaign - identifies which campaign the promotion or offer is associated with, such as a product launch, sale or giveaway.
utm_content - identifies the exact element on your ad that gets the most clicks. This is often used to help optimise your campaign and determine which part of your content drives the most traffic to a particular web page.
utm_term - works for paid search campaigns to help identify the right keywords for your ads.

How do UTM parameters work?

It takes knowledge of using the right naming conventions and correct techniques to get the most from your UTM parameters. Unfortunately, many businesses who rely on Google Analytics to analyse their website traffic lack an understanding of how to do it properly and don’t set up their UTMs correctly.

As the customer journey becomes more complex, these parameters help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Knowing what type of content resonates well with your brand is vital to driving more visits and conversions to your website.

Businesses who don’t know how to correctly tag UTMs are missing a valuable opportunity. It means you’ll extract only limited information from your site visitors and miss out on discovering which marketing campaigns are delivering better results.

How do channel groupings work?

In your Google Analytics reports, channel groupings organise your data according to the most common sources of traffic. For example, you can see how effective paid search, organic or direct is for sending visits to your website.

You may also have particular channel categories that you’d like to send your traffic to when visitors land on your website. In which case, you can create ‘custom channel groupings’, which allow you to drill down into your traffic sources even further. As an example, you could have a category for ‘email’ vs ‘newsletters’ vs ‘non-email’ visits bucketed under ‘other’. You can then compare data between these distinct categories to determine which channels perform better.

Setting up custom channel groups is a powerful way to explore another level of detail and learn more about your users and the role they play in the conversion funnel.

How can we help?

Our Datalicious specialists can help you reveal the true value of your UTM parameters and channel groupings, so you can manage your marketing more effectively.

When it comes to channel groupings, we can help you create custom groups in your Google Analytics platform. For example, if your strategy is to analyse how your campaigns that were driven by awareness influences purchase behaviour, you can customise your groups in your Analytics platform to reflect this outcome, so you can make more sense of your data and gain deeper insights about how your campaigns are performing.

By learning about your user journeys in detail, marketers gain the confidence of knowing exactly which channels and traffic sources to invest their future marketing efforts in and allow for smarter budget allocation and a better return on investment.

Find out how the Datalicious team can help you with UTM parameters and channel groupings in Google Analytics for marketing best practice and analytics. Contact us for more info.

Background image: Intro text:

If you want a more coherent understanding of how visitors interact with your website, be sure to make use of Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters and channel groupings in Google Analytics. These advanced tracking and grouping options provide useful insights into the traffic and value generated from your marketing campaigns.

Post type: Article

Optimise the customer journey with multi-touch attribution

admin — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 01:00:37 +0000

Compete more effectively in today’s environment with a fuller understanding of each individual’s end-to-end experience across the customer journey and grow customer value by identifying those consumers more likely to buy from and remain loyal to your brand.

OptimaHub is a people-based marketing measurement and analytics solution that delivers the customer journey tools needed to measure and value every phase of the customer journey. It helps marketers reduce ad waste, optimise ad spend and drive sustainable long-term growth by delivering a clearer understanding of the full impact their marketing actions may have on consumer behavior and loyalty.

More information on Media Attribution.

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The OptimaHub multi-touch attribution solution can help marketers understand what touch-points are helping to drive conversions and sales and which touch-points may have a negative impact on the journey.

Post type: Video