channels, a much more multi-dimensional view.” She maintains that Anametrix is the first company to provide this holistic view, pulling data from different marketing channels into cloud-based analytics that can be used by consumer marketers to see if their campaigns are working in real time.
“Lots of vendors who do social media analytics say they provide a holistic view, but they’re really just analyzing their own silo,” Thorogood says. “There is nobody else out there who provides this sort of holistic view across all digital sources.”
Anametrix also can be used to pull in data from other sources, Thorogood says. The company has developed a plug-in for Microsoft Excel (introduced in late January) that enables clients to pull in marketing data from any source connected to the Anametrix platform, including Web analytics, advertising, e-mail marketing, social media, search engine marketing, surveys, live chat, sales software, marketing automation, U.S Census, and third-party research.
“Microsoft Excel is still the primary analytics tool that most mortals use,” Thorogood says. Rather than trying to force customers to use the Anametrix Web-based interface, the plug-in enables customers to use the familiar Excel format. Unlike analytic tools that only allow users to export data into Excel, Thorogood says the plug-in is “bi-directional,” enabling users to see how changes would affect consumer behavior.
The Anametrix technology can be used to assess what would happen by adjusting key variables—by spending more or less on Google AdWords, for example—to see which option makes more money. The model also could be tweaked to show how different discount offers or other types of incentives would affect the profit margins related to particular marketing campaigns, Thorogood says.
Such technology ultimately enables corporate brands to optimize the efficiency of their marketing campaigns by identifying “micro-segments” and “micro-targeting” them in ways that maximize the conversion of shoppers to buyers. In this way, ads become increasingly customized to become more relevant to the viewing, search, and purchase patterns of consumers.
Thorogood says the companies that thrive are the ones that can do the best job of measuring these touch points of consumer behavior from different channels.
