By Andre Steenekamp, CEO of 25AM

South African marketers should be investing in advanced data visualisation tools in order to better understand digital campaign data and view it within the context of other business metrics such as sales and offline campaign performance.

That’s according to Andre Steenekamp, CEO of 25AM, who says that brands need to get a more complete view of campaign performance and customer data if they are to make the most of their marketing and advertising spending. Data visualisation tools can import reports from digital tools such as DoubleClick and social listening platforms as well as data from other business systems to provide a holistic and integrated view of marketing performance.  

Says Steenekamp: “Many digital marketers are still measuring performance by means of clicks and basic user actions such as form submissions. But they are not yet looking at how social media, offline campaigns, and other factors influence their performance.

“It is time to stop hiding behind the click and take more accountability. We as agencies and marketers have the tools and data we need to measure campaigns in a more holistic manner. This is the key to making informed and intelligent campaign decisions that allow us to continuously improve business performance.”

25AM has developed an advanced tool that gets reports directly from DoubleClick via an application programming interface (API) and allows files from other sources to be dropped in and superimposed. For example, users can draw reports from social listening tools to determine where the influencers are. They can see how certain campaign elements influenced social media users and measure sentiment around the campaign. They can potentially also overlay TV and print campaign data to see how these channels impact social media. Or they could look at how sales have responded following the launch of a major campaign.

What sets 25AM’s solution apart is that it doesn’t rely on pulling data from CSV or Excel files – data can be viewed and analysed in a single, integrated visual report. That means marketers can see dense information about the relationships between different metrics with a single view. They can measure campaigns down to a highly granular level, looking at, for example campaign data for a specific time of the day.

“Today, marketers have a wealth of digital data at their fingertips, but it can be challenging to digest it and view it in a broader business context,” says Steenekamp. “Data visualisation helps marketers get to the information they need to achieve better results.”