Where to get data for planning digital advertising campaigns

Most technical inventions, architectural structures, and other innovations are created and exist successfully because of data, correct calculations, and conclusions made by the relevant experts.

Marketing and advertising are no exception. Here data plays a fundamental role in analyzing and creating brand promotion strategies. In order to properly analyze and draw the right conclusions from the numbers, you need to understand what data exists and for what purposes it can be used.

There are three types of data in digital marketing:

• internal

• external (market)

• researches

Let's look at each type in more detail.

Internal data includes:

• CRM

• Google Analytics / Adobe Marketing

• sales reports (sales tool)

• customer feedback/complaints

CRM is the best source of internal data. It allows you to analyze in detail the customer purchase history, automate communication with customers and personalize it to the maximum.

For example, with CRM and web analytics you can understand which creatives/products in an advertising campaign brought the most sales/registrations or which creatives are better for Facebook, and which ones for Google.

Among the popular CRM systems: Siebel, Terradata CRM, SAP CRM, Salesforce, bpm'online (Terrasoft).

Web analytics is a must for any business which regularly carries out advertising campaigns on the Internet. It allows you to understand the quality of the traffic received from an advertising campaign.

Among the most common analytics systems are:

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics system in the world. But it has a high deviation in high traffic, and the Premium version costs a lot of money.

Omniture – formerly the leading platform.

Yandex-Metrics – has a number of unique features.

Woopra – a solution for thematic projects.

Sales reports (sales tool) give you an understanding of how your marketing really works. Their main function is to optimize, automate and monitor the management processes at all stages of the sales process.

Customer feedback shows the bottlenecks of your marketing. A company's openness to accepting feedback from customers is usually directly proportional to their level of loyalty.

External data can be divided into the following types:

• monitoring of competitor activity

• insider information

• analytical notes

Competitor activity monitoring. SimilarWeb is a cool free tool to evaluate a competitor's site. The best-paid tool is CMetr.

MediaAnalyzer, Semrush, Serpstat, Competera are the tools for working with channels.

Insider data is the best, but certainly not the most legitimate way to anticipate competitors' actions.

Analytical Notes. Various companies compile news and monitoring data into analytical notes and then sell access to them. With rare exceptions, such information cannot be obtained for free. The reports come out tentatively titled "Beer/broadband/cough medicine market overview."

Researches:

• industrial

• category

• channel

• qualitative

*The previous three are quantitative

Industrial: researches with a general population and relevant sample of consumers + direct statistics from the statistical bureau.

TNS MMI – market standard

Derzhkomstat (State Statistics Committee), Eurostat are examples of industrial data sources

Category: studies concerning only one category or market segment.

For example, you can get retail market research from GFK, beer sales research and monitoring from Nielsen, and pharmaceutical market monitoring and research from Pharmstandard.

Channel: studies related to one channel of communication/sales.

Gemius – digital campaign monitoring and planning tool

Nielsen – TV campaigns monitor and planner

Qualitative: researches that aim to determine the audience's reaction to a message, idea or creative.

InMind, TNS, Gradus are the market leaders in this segment.

What's the conclusion?

Data in digital marketing plays the role of the foundation of your future architectural project – the strategy and tactics of advertising campaigns. By understanding from which source to take information, you are able to gather the most realistic picture of the category landscape, market leaders, their advertising activity, the share of voice, and the source of online traffic. Through proper data analysis and correct conclusions, you will be able to set relevant objectives for your advertising campaign and create a powerful and effective strategy and tactics that will fulfill these objectives.