Some people say it’s a matter of getting buy-in from key stakeholders. Maddeningly, others believe it’s the CEO’s responsibility to, as Star Trek’s Capt. Jean-Luc Picard would often say, “make it so.”

That’s what SAS, the business analytics software giant, and the CMO Council found when they surveyed over 400 senior marketers and senior IT executives from top global brands for their March 2013 report “Big Data’s Biggest Role: Aligning the CMO & CIO.”

Their research found that the old cliché about CIOs and CMOs being at each other’s throats is virtually nonexistent, with both marketing and IT seeing eye-to-eye on the core aspects of what makes a customer-centric organization.

“Both groups (76 percent of marketers, 69 percent of IT executives) believe that working within a corporate culture that places the customer at the center of the relationship is key. Both also agree (40 percent marketers, 51 percent of IT executives) that big data is critical to executing on customer-centric programs.”

Sounds good. But, frustratingly, while these two organizational leads are already working together, they’re not making the most of their collective efforts because, as the report summarizes:

“What is lacking is not the will to partner, but the mandate to partner. This lack of top-down leadership became most evident when both marketing and IT were asked to identify the primary owner of the customer within their organization. The picture that emerges is one of chaos, ill-defined ownership and organizations without a clear center point that is dedicated to advancing customer centricity.”

That center point, the report suggests, should be the CEO, who can take full ownership of the customer and serve as the singular voice with the power to mandate that business decisions be centered on the customer across all functions.

In a recent Summit focused on how to build a data-driven culture for marketing, which Cardinal Path co-hosted with Google, audience questions and comments very quickly voiced many marketers’ frustration about the lack of senior commitment and engagement to prioritizing a data and analytics strategy.

As CMOs, it’s incumbent upon us to be the change agents spurring organizations in the direction of making rationalized decisions supported by the data that is now available to us from our marketing channels and partners.

Yes, it requires senior sponsorship — and if that sponsorship comes with a clear vision for how a holistic data strategy can transform not just sales, but whole organizations, even better — but ultimately it requires leadership from the top person in the organization with the responsibility for facilitating growth, sales and marketing strategy.

CMOs must take the reins and provide a data strategy vision if one isn’t already in place. If that means becoming the organization’s top data literacy champion, making the business case for data driven decision making until he or she’s blue in the face, so be it.

Alternately, CMOs can clearly demonstrate the value of data in decision making by taking on the role of storyteller.

An intriguing issue also raised in last month’s Summit saw our panelists discussing whether or not marketing teams were doing an adequate job of storytelling — translating data into insights and actionable recommendations that helped marketers’ to iterate their strategic assumptions, marketing tactics and channel investments.

Many wondered aloud if they were doing enough to present insights from data in ways that were truly impacting the business and the marketing resource allocation decisions being made for the organization.

Showing the utility of data applied to the fundamental questions of what is driving profitable growth is critical and too often marketing practitioners are incapable of demonstrating the intrinsic value of how data can affect granular decision-making.

It won’t be easy. But as professional marketers, surely we’re up to the task of educating our organizations on how to bridge the analytics divide and make our marketing investments more accountable.

Barb Kittridge is Chief Marketing Officer of Cardinal Path, a dedicated team of passionate, award winning analysts, statisticians, academics, leading developers, and some of the top minds in the digital marketing space. Cardinal Path helps its clients unlock the value of their data across a wide digital footprint, sharing all that we know and empowering confident decision making that creates sustainable growth.

“I was thinking about various ways of using web analytics and commonly faced problems when implementing or using web analytics solutions … Checking site tagging integrity is a problem common to all vendors, consultants and analysts.”

This marked the hatching of the WASP project.

From there, the Web Analytics Solution Profiler grew a strong and dedicated fan base from what was (back then) a much smaller web analytics community.

This community has inspired me in writing dozens of posts on the topic of quality assurance, speaking at conferences, leading workshops and offering training on the importance of making the right decisions on the right data.

Unfortunately, the challenges of data quality remain largely unresolved…

… even with the advent of tag management systems. Today, it is even harder to figure out what’s going on behind the scenes of your web pages. The complexity in media data-gathering has increased exponentially and so many tagging quality issues go unresolved that over the years I’ve never seen a site without issues.

Plus, the counter part of tagging is rarely even adressed: making sure the configuration is right has remained the safeguarded kingdom of specialists.

You can’t copy true innovation

When it came out, WASP was unique and truly innovative. The little wasp pioneered the concept of quality assurance for web analytics. Since then, many lookalikes have sprung up but they are all fundamentally based on the same concepts pioneered way back when.

In 2009, I sold the technology to another company but the innovation stalled… so I took back control of it a few months ago and folded it under Cardinal Path’s amazing skills and expertise in the field.

Our new WASP for Chrome beta is gaining momentum and innovates in many ways. Some features are so unique that we are filing patents for them. For example, the new WASP visualization clearly highlights how Google Tag Manager (gtm.js) is used to embed Google Analytics with the remarketing option (dc.js) and the exact beacon sending data to Google (_utm.gif). This page also fires Adobe Site Catalyst, Uservoice and Tynt.

My take on data: quality, quality, quality

Current auditing solutions are time-consuming, complex and expensive. This often leads to collecting wrong or incomplete data – and businesses simply can’t afford to make important decisions on the wrong data.

Cardinal Path has done hundreds of implementations, audits and training sessions – we know what to look for when it comes to data quality. And, through WASP, we will gradually make our wisdom accessible to users well beyond the elite group of data specialists.

Get WASP for Chrome

It’s the question on every CMO’s mind these days: Where am I going to find the right people to carry out my data-driven marketing strategy?

According to the “Big Data Executive Survey,” conducted in the summer of 2012 by NewVantage Partners, 70 percent of C-level executives surveyed said they plan to hire data scientists, but find the task from “challenging” to “extremely difficult.” And, the preface to the report noted, “there is no reliable source of new talent in this category.”

The complexity of such a fundamental quest for the right talent demands to be unpacked. It’s not simply a matter of finding a good traditional marketer, because the media landscape today demands someone who can think far beyond today’s popular and emerging platforms.

And it’s not a matter of simply finding a great “quant” — an expert in quantitative analysis — who might be able to make sense of the cascade of data, but falter in translating it into actionable business intelligence and then communicating it to stakeholders.

So where do you find great data-driven marketers?

In an August 2012 interview with CMO.com, McKinsey & Company partner Homayoun Hatami suggested CMOs start fishing for PhDs with advanced training in experimental design, statistics, and machine learning. Start your search at tech startups, government agencies, defense contractors, aerospace, oil exploration and universities. Tim Barker, CMO of DataSift, the social data platform told CMO.com to look toward Wall Street.

“The banking industry was one of the first industries to realize the benefits of Big Data and data science, [and became] a breeding ground for the skill set required for both the technology skills and the quantitative analysis skills needed to analyze and understand both data trends and business impact,” Barker said.

Data-informed.com’s Joe Mullich recently interviewed Greta Roberts, CEO of Talent Analytics, who suggested that efforts are best spent on attracting the right people via intriguing job postings.

Roberts said the most effective job ads for analytics professionals “engage the brain,” such as by posing an intriguing question or problem to solve like when Google, in search of engineers, put up subway banners that challenged passersby to solve a complicated math problem. It’s all about attracting those interested in solving interesting problems.

She suggested companies place one-paragraph case studies on the careers section of their websites showing the intriguing analytics projects they have done or planned. “Interesting work equals solving interesting problems,” Roberts said. “Saying you can’t recruit people because you’re in a [non-glamorous area] is a copout.”

Ultimately, finding the right talent will be different for every CMO. Some will need to look to specialist partners, like Cardinal Path, who can provide technology, business and strategic expertise to organizations at any level of data maturity. Others will have the best luck in nurturing it within their teams.

A great marketer with the potential to be a great data analyst — or a skilled numbers person who can see the bigger picture and intuit what questions to ask — could already be somewhere in your organization.

Look for those who can:

- Balance lots of input simultaneously — react and adjust to some, while ignoring other inputs in the moment — without getting overwhelmed.

- Come at something new from a different angle and use their curiosity to tease understanding out of what’s in front of them.

- Laugh at failure. Those who are comfortable with walking into the unknown and learn through trial and error have the greatest potential for success through their own creativity.

- Roll with the punches. Keep your eye out for people who happily make do with what they’ve got and never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

- Reuse, recycle and repurpose. Look for those who inherently understand that they don’t have to recreate the wheel every time as long as they’ve been diligent in their process and data validation.

The next wave of great data-driven marketers is poised to emerge. Until then, the hunt continues.

Have you had great success finding the right people with a particular university program, job board, headhunter or LinkedIn group? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

Barb Kittridge is Chief Marketing Officer of Cardinal Path, a dedicated team of passionate, award winning analysts, statisticians, academics, leading developers, and some of the top minds in the digital marketing space. Cardinal Path helps its clients unlock the value of their data across a wide digital footprint, sharing all that we know and empowering confident decision making that creates sustainable growth.

Recently, I picked up the “fully revised” 2^nd edition. It’s 100 pages longer, so what’s new?  And is it worth reading the 2^nd edition if you’ve already read the 1^st?

What’s (Mostly) Unchanged?

Most sections are similar to those of the 1^st edition, including the opening sections that provide high level (but useful) explanations on things like:

• What a landing page is
• The various types of landing pages
• The importance of understanding your business model
• Conversion actions

And in the latter sections – Mechanics of Testing and Organizing and Planning – the content is similar.

Tim Ash’s Landing Page Optimization 2nd Edition book cover

What’s New?

The greatest enhancements have been in the “middle bits”:

• Finding Opportunities for Site Improvement
• Fixing Your Site Problems

Being a UX guy, I’m probably biased. But to me, these “middle bits” are the most interesting part of the process. So I was very happy to see these sections expanded.

There’s lots of new content. My two favorite new chapters are:

1.     “Common Problems – The Seven Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design”

As Tim writes, “This is as close to a ‘Silver Bullet’ as we will offer in this book.”  The Seven Deadly Sins are:

• Unclear Call-to-Action
• Too Many Choices
• Visual Distractions
• Not Keeping Your Promises
• Too Much Text
• Asking for Too Much Information
• Lack of Trust and  Credibility

Tim gives detailed explanations of the nature of these problems and provides great examples – plus specific recommendations for how to ensure your pages don’t fall into these traps. It’s an extremely useful checklist of things to look for when faced with the task of figuring out how to make a page work better.

If you just read this one chapter, and apply the concepts to your landing pages, your conversion rates will improve. This new chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

2.      “Best Practices for Common Situations”

Another useful addition, this chapter – like the Seven Deadly Sins chapter – provides “a great kick-start in your optimization efforts.”  It takes a look at these common situations:

• Homepages
• Information Architecture and Navigation
• E-Commerce Catalogs
• Registration and Multiple-Step Flows
• Mobile Websites

For each situation, there’s a concise yet useful summary of recommended best practices. For example, in the section on homepages, Tim offers a strong opinion on rotating banners, writing that (on e-Commerce sites at least) they “are absolutely evil and should be removed immediately.”  He then provides six compelling arguments to back up his assertion.

If you’re looking for testing ideas, it’s hard to imagine that reading this section wouldn’t give you at least a couple.

What’s missing?

Some sections from the 1^st Edition have been removed or reduced, but nothing that anyone is likely to miss.

The 1^st Edition had an entire chapter (technically an appendix) devoted to Google Website Optimizer.  The 2^nd Edition covers GWO in 4 short paragraphs. However, seeing as GWO was discontinued last summer, nobody will complain about this! (There is no mention of GWO’s inferior replacement: Content Experiments.)

There’s also a bit less detail regarding data analysis of multivariate tests. Specifically, the explanation of the fractional factorial methods (Plackett-Burman, Latin Squares, and Taguchi method) has been removed.  However, few people will miss this: Those who have a strong background in data analysis didn’t need it; those who don’t probably skipped it!

Is It Worth Buying?

If there was a weakness with the 1^st Edition, it was its limitations in providing specific guidance on what to test. The 2^nd Edition is much better at helping users formulate test ideas – which is arguably the most challenging part of the entire conversion optimization process.

The 2^nd Edition takes what was already an excellent guide to conversion optimization, and makes it even more useful. If you already own the 1^st Edition, it’s well worth investing in the 2^nd. And if you don’t have the 1^st Edition, buying the 2^nd is a no-brainer.

There were too many high points and unique perspectives to include here but I wanted to highlight three key areas that really struck me during the wide-ranging discussion as a preview of topics I’ll be writing about here on The Path in the coming weeks:

Talent Search:

So we all know that our organizations need to strategize with a data-driven approach, but where do you find the people who have the experience, industry-insight and the profile to lead this evolution?

What’s the new profile that you need, from a marketing perspective, to not only make sense of data, but then translate it into actionable business intelligence? Where do you find these people — are the traditional places for looking for marketing talent going to provide that pipeline of people or do we need to get creative in our searches?

Organizational Buy-in:

The question of the hour was one you’ve probably asked yourself over and over again: How do you get organization-wide and C-level buy-in for using analytics to bring a data strategy to life?

Judging from the questions and comments during our discussion, there is clearly a pent-up level of frustration because many marketers are just not sure management “gets” it.

And there’s a sense that marketers spend so many hours capturing, collating, validating and cleaning data that it leaves very little time to do analysis and develop useable insights to share with the organization.

How to develop management support for and the commitment to transitioning to data-driven strategies will definitely be the subject of a future “The Path” post, stay tuned.

Privacy Concerns:

Everyone is anxious about issues surrounding data transparency, privacy and how it can complicate marketers’ relationships with consumers.

As Cardinal Path CEO Andrew Swinand told the crowd, “As consumers more closely guard their privacy, it becomes more incumbent on marketers to create the value exchange that will make customers want to opt-in to share their data…it changes the marketing experience to move away from messages to experiences.”

More to come on each of these important topics, but in the meantime, take a look at our Twitter Storify “Internet Week New York ‘Unleashing the Power of Data’ Summit” for a full Twitter timeline of reactions / comments on the event — there’s even a short Vine video to watch. Enjoy!