Have you ever been to a Cirque du Soleil show? The level of anticipation as you enter the big tent is reinforced by the excitement of the crowd itself. Throughout the show, you are inspired by the displays of juggling skill, acts of acrobatic prowess and feats of strength and flexibility. Google IO is to developers and the community at large something somewhat similar – exciting, inspiring, amazing!

I was not one of the lucky attendees this year, but I heard the cheers through social media and peeked through the virtual tent thanks to the video streaming.

The announcement

One of the best parts of the show was the announcement that Google Analytics Premium data will be available in BigQuery. This opens a new playground of endless possibilities for analysts, marketers, data scientists and developers.

BigQuery leverages Google’s massive computing power to analyze huge amounts of data in the cloud, with no up-front investments (you pay for what you use). It also facilitates collaboration amongst analysts and stakeholders safely and securely. BigQuery doesn’t offer (and isn’t supposed to be) a “slicing & dicing” data analysis tool.  You can’t play and explore with data as you do for example in Google Analytics interface.  Rather, BigQuery shines once you know which question to ask: its genius lies in enabling you to sift through very large volumes of data (the proverbial Big Data) in minutes instead of hours or days.

BigQuery isn’t for visualization either – so once you have isolated the data you need you can always export the results to Tableau or your dashboarding tool of choice.

What does it mean for Google Analytics Premium? What are the possibilities?

• One of the critiques raised by competing vendors was that hit-level (raw data) was not available – now you got it! Big time! This was a subtle element mentioned in the announcement;

• Thanks to Universal Analytics dimension widening and the ability to join other data sources, you will be able to leverage Big Data concepts directly and conduct very sophisticated analysis – at Google speed!

My take

At a recent eMetrics conference I shared my point of view on how Big Data will impact the future of today’s digital analysts. One of the highlights is clearly that our field is expanding in areas that were traditionally the safeguard of statisticians who had a skillset few of the traditional Google Analytics users have. You have to pick the area of expertise you want to develop – will you tame data as savvy marketer, be the master of the complex technology landscape or become the data guru who can juggle with data and make it spark? The emerging opportunities reinforce what a dynamic space our industry is becoming – one that drives accountability for the considerable investments marketers spend.

Dahlström and Edelman are spot-on in describing how consumer demands will rise in response to technology. They will want to interact anywhere at any time, do new things in response to information that creates value for them, they’ll expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize their buying experience, and they’ll expect all interactions to be easy.

Meeting those expectations promises to be an exciting and worthy challenge for data-driven marketers, but the trick to maneuvering this potential minefield of consumer wants will be to be proactive, not reactive.

Here are three things you need to consider as you attempt to make the most of the customer demands your data can uncover:

Be obsessive about understanding your customer behavior

Never before has it been so critical to create a singular view of the customer. Internal teams and agency partners must pull together to work more cohesively, because without seamless insight-sharing, larger organizations can miss the opportunity to respond to changing consumer motivations because reporting functionality is so slow.

Marketing teams that aren’t already working closely with multiple stakeholders across their organizations will lose the opportunity to iterate strategically, in real time, because their data is sitting in silos across different areas of the organization.

When mobile, social, SEO/SEM and offline data are walled-off from each other, marketers aren’t able to make quick reactions to opportunities to give consumers what they expect. And when those consumers — who are increasingly empowered by unprecedented flows of granular purchase-decision information — see that a brand is not reacting quickly enough to them, they’ll move on to a brand that will.

Don’t over react, adapt

The danger of being able to turn on a dime with your customer is that marketing organizations could get too reactive. Strategy needs to be adaptive, but you can’t just focus on quick course corrections because you’ll quickly lose sight of the end goal and your strategy will devolve into chaos.

Having the right level of responsiveness does not mean turning over marketing decisions to data. That’s a sure path to ending up with a disorganized collection of one-off tactics that could be just as damaging to your organization as doing nothing at all.

Adapting to consumer demands will require CMOs to take a strong leadership role and make sure their organization doesn’t lose sight of both short- and long-term KPIs. As always, the CMO will have to balance sales with continuous monitoring of things like customer preference, sentiment and return on investment.

Share the wealth of data driven insights

So you’ve completed the rigorous process of bringing your internal and external marketing teams together and understanding which data sets you need to mine for consumer insights. Now, don’t make the mistake of keeping it to yourself.

Get those rich customer observations to other key stakeholders in your organization, they can be useful to your customer service and sales departments and any other part of the organization that can strengthen its performance by better understanding the customer.

If your data doesn’t live up to that potential, you’ve got an excellent start for conversations about what your organization needs to learn and how to get that information to the right people, at the right time, to enhance decision-making.

Think of this new chapter in the marketer-customer relationship as just-in-time marketing — a more nuanced system of near-real-time response to viable business opportunities sure to keep today’s always-on, ever-informed consumers engaged, interacting and buying your products and services.

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.

Competitive Research

One thing we talk about constantly at Cardinal Path is to test, test, test. With AdWords that means always split testing your ads. Find the better performing ad and replace the poor performing ad. This means lots of new ad creation which also means coming up with new ad text ideas all the time.  If you’re in need of some inspiration, consider using the Ad Preview Tool to check out how other ads in different cities and markets are being written. I’m not talking about stealing ad text, I’m talking about reviewing how others are creating ads to gain new insights and break that writers block.

Gain an Understanding into Which Ad Groups Trigger your Ads

Hopefully you’ve spent time creating your account structure with tightly targeted ad groups. You want specific ads triggered when users search for specific queries. The Preview tool is handy in the way that you can check to see whether the correct ad, within the correct Ad Group, is being triggered. This is something you’ll want to watch for if you have similar Broad Matched keywords in separate Ad Groups.

If you’ve checked your keyword and find that it in fact the wrong ad from the wrong ad group is being triggered, there are a couple of things that you can do. You can make some match type or structural changes within your account, or you can add negative keywords. Gain an understanding of which search query keywords are triggering the wrong ad to show and then consider using these keywords as negatives within that Ad Group.

Check Your Branded Keywords for Affiliates

If you run an affiliate campaign, you’ll want to check your Brand related keywords from time to time. If within your Terms of Service you state that affiliates can’t run on branded keywords, don’t take it for granted, check for yourself. Affiliates breaking your TOS can be hard to detect depending on how sneaky they are. You’ll want to check your branded keywords in a region outside of the city where your head quarters is located. Affiliates will exclude this area to avoid anyone at the head office stumbling upon their ads.

Type your branded keywords into the Ad Preview tool (targeting and outside city). If AdWords tells you that your ads aren’t running, yet you still see an ad using your domain within the preview pain, then you might have affiliate issues.

I’d say it’s due to fear about how to tame overwhelming waves of data and general ambiguity about who in the organization is responsible for doing it.

As organizations fall prey to “analysis paralysis” which, for a CMO, could mean that he or she has little hands-on experience with mining data, understanding complex algorithms or evaluating discrete data sets. It could also be exacerbated by the marketing function now being inundated with data flowing in from multiple channels in such a disjointed stream that it’s nearly impossible to glean insights about how customer behaviors link back to marketing efforts.

Second, CMOs often don’t perceive the data strategy as part of their core responsibilities – and neither do the rest of their organizations. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit report “Outside Looking In: The CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite,” non-marketing executives see marketing’s top priority as driving revenue whereas CMOs see themselves as being in charge of creating new products/services and customer acquisition.

The preponderance of data has created innumerable opportunities for the CMO to do both, while being at the center of building a data-driven culture for their organizations.

Getting there requires CMOs do nothing less than take the wheel by becoming their organization’s point of data integration. They must not only embrace and incorporate data into their marketing efforts, but actually become the champion of the entire organization’s data strategy, moving it toward making better-informed decisions, at speed, across the enterprise.

Very few CMOs at the top of their game can be looked at as examples of marketing leaders who both excel at traditional marketing leadership and have also pushed their organizations to quantify their return on investment and engagement.

One great example is Keith Weed, CMO of Unilever. He likes to say he’s striving to balance delivering magic along with logic. It’s a balance that all CMOs – in a world of razor thin margins and the never-ending organizational misbelief that marketing is nothing more than erratically successful puffery – should aim for.

From using data to make marketing’s functions more efficient to creating better brand engagement and a more helpful shopping experience, to the mined behavioral data that allows consumers to find and access entertainment geared towards their individual tastes and interests (think Amazon and Netflix) to delivering customized buying experiences, there has never been a better time for marketing executives to use data to lead.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s hubris or overreach to imagine the CMO stepping up to drive an entire organization’s data strategy – it can be done and doesn’t require a dimunition of the role of either the CIO or CTO’s responsibilities.

Truth be told, in some organizations, it can feel as though that’s what it has to come down to – who hasn’t heard Gartner’s prediction that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO? But, that’s actually an opportunity for CMOs to lead on data. A recent survey of IT workers found that the most significant challenge they face when working with their data is that it’s siloed in various business applications across the organization – a pain point that marketing can help alleviate by championing focused, enterprise-wide data strategies.

The “analysis paralysis” crowd must find ways to acquire what is quickly becoming a new literacy for high-level marketers: leverage tools such as Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics Premium which are out there specifically to help turn hard data into a true understanding of your online presence.

The other actionable step is to talk to the internal digital marketing expert, external agency partners and the organization’s top tech person about how to break organizational data silos and leverage quantifiable insights to make the smartest marketing investments.

The CMO Survey recently reported that companies will spend between 6 to 10 percent more marketing budget on data over the next three years. Yet, when asked to report the percentage of projects in which their companies used marketing analytics that are available and/or requested, CMOs reported a dismal 30 percent usage rate – a drop from 37 percent a year ago, creating a gap between investment and utilization.

CMO’s: Your opportunity to transform your organization’s use of data is calling. Will you answer?

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.

When building a brand new campaign, we tend to talk about separating things out into individual campaigns with plenty of small and targeted Ad Groups. In this scenario, your accounts are likely to be well organized and the chances for duplicate keywords are on the smaller side. Where problems with duplicate keywords start to come into the picture, is when you have an account that has evolved over the years or if you’ve taken over an account from a previous manager. This is where, if you haven’t been vigilant over your organization, things can get a little messy.

Before I get into the tool itself, I just want to stress the importance of removing duplicate keywords. The issue is that if you have two of the same keywords within your account, they essentially compete against each other making you pay more in the end.

To use the Duplicate Keyword Finder within the Adwords Editor:

• Select the top level account folder or the campaign folder you’d like to look in
• Select ‘Tools’ from the top Menu Bar
• Select ‘Find Duplicate Keywords’

With this tool you’re given a few options:

Word Order

You can select ‘strict word order’ or ‘any word order’. Remember, if you’re using the Broad Match, match type a keyword such as ‘used books’ and ‘books used’ is the same thing.

Match Types

You can select that they must have the same match type or different match types. Generally you’ll want to select that they have the same match type.

Location of Duplicates

Select whether you want to look across the entire account, in specific campaigns or ad groups. If you select to look across the entire account, you may have the same keywords in different campaigns targeting different geographic regions. Obviously these shouldn’t be regarded as duplicates as they won’t compete against each other.

Hide Duplicates

This gives you the option to show or hide duplicate keywords appearing in paused or deleted campaigns.

Once your selections are now made, you’ll be easily able to see any duplicate keywords across your selected campaigns. With the editors handy interface you can now pause or delete your duplicated keywords directly from this interface.

Once you’re in the duplicate keywords screen and want to get back to show all of your keywords, just select the ‘view’ drop down box from the top of the screen, and select ‘all’.

If you make regular keyword changes and additions within the account, then this is something that I would recommend checking from time to time as it’s quick and easy to do.