Rajkumar Venkatesan - Marketing Analytics

T heres a lot in this book that I wish I had known when I was building my first company. You can read about that adventure in , although I recommend that you work your way there rather than just jumping ahead. We first called the company Retail Relay, and back then, when we were growing it, the authors of this book wrote a case study about it for the University of Virginias Darden School of Business. They had been my professors when I was thereteaching me both marketing and marketing analyticsand as they wrote and I worked, they become my mentors. The advice and guidance that they gave me, a newly minted MBA with a big dream, was invaluable.

However, as I read the case study now and think back about the company, I am embarrassed at all of the mistakes we made, even with that guidance. A book like this, one that lays out the fundamentals of marketing analytics, would have made a real difference as I built the marketing capabilities at Relay.

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I dont know which half, said John Wanamaker (18381922).

Back in the nineteenth century, when Wanamaker is supposed to have made this famous statement, there really was no way to know how a companys marketing was affecting its sales. Marketing analytics has changed all of that. Its techniques let marketers know what brings in customers, what keeps them connected to the company, and what they like (and dont). This knowledge allows a company to make the most effective use of its marketing dollars, and, with that, to grow and increase its chances of becoming a real success.

If you dont already know about marketing analytics, you will discover as you start to read and interact with this book that marketing analytics is a critical field, and a growing one. Marketing is about how to place your product so that it will have the most exposure and gain the most customers. Marketing analytics involves using the data that you can glean from customer decisions to determine how a company should use its marketing money to achieve the most fruitful results. You will see that the more effectively companies employ marketing analytics, the more effectively they can deploy their marketing resources, the more quickly they grow, and the more successful they will be. The research on this is impressive and convincing. If your company is serious about acquiring customers at scale, it needs to take full advantage of the information that marketing analytics can give it. It is one thing to collect data; it is another to use marketing analytics to understand them and make them actionable. Or, as the authors put it, The tools that open that treasure trove of data are marketing analytics.

This book will be an invaluable resource for any chief executive, head of marketing, or head of marketing analytics, as well as for anyone who is interested in developing a sense of how a company should allocate its moneyits marketing spendfor the ultimate effectiveness. This is a good book if you have experience with marketing but need to be more robust in your understanding of how to use data. You should read it if you are part of the decision process around how to spend money, if you are a marketer, or if you are a graduate student trying to decide whether this is how you want to spend your career.

You can get a lot out of this book even if you dont have a marketing background (although you will find that having some math and statistics fundamentals is helpful). It will give you a good introduction to the concept of media channels; it walks you through real-life problems, step by step; it presents key words and technical concepts; it teaches you how to design an experiment and how to collect the data you need. It helps you learn to work with both quantitative and qualitative analysis. With this book, you will learn how to interact with the largest, most prevalent platforms, because it will show you how to bid, and how to leverage your viewing numbers and ad words. It will give you a strong understanding of the big players in the search world, which is something that every marketing and marketing analytics person today needs to know.

If you are already a practitioner, and even if you have been working in the area for a long time, this book will challenge you to think more broadly about the field. The case studies can help even the most seasoned professional think through fundamental concepts more practically, refreshing your perspective and helping you to maintain your peak creativity and agility when considering how best to use data for your company.

If any of this is what you are looking for, this is your book. It is not a dry but informative textbook, announcing concepts and hoping that you can handle the math. Much better, it is an engaging discussion about how to make marketing decisions based on the growing body of data that is available. The book is interactive; it teaches through the case method, training you in how to think through marketing problems and make more focused and more accurate decisions.

Companies are spending many millions of dollars in marketing. In the past, a marketing manager would put ads on television and in the paper, circulate flyers, post on billboards, or rely on word-of-mouth support from customers, and then try to estimate, based on surveys and sales data, which approach had been the most effective. There was no realistic way to ascertain a direct correlation between the marketing output and the sales numbers. Today, a company can pour money into a direct response campaign and end up with a volume of data that is almost unbelievable in its richness, quality, and sheer volume. But once you have it, analyzing this data becomes critical; it can make or break a company. It is the magic of marketing analytics that will allow you to develop a clear attribution of how your companys spending is affecting your customers decisions.

I have come a long way from Relay. After heading eCommerce Technology for the international division at Walmart, I am now the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stubhub. I was less involved with marketing analytics at Walmart, but since joining Stubhub, I have become more sophisticated in my approach to marketing data; I had to, because the marketing analytics department reports to me. At Stubhub, we spend a significant amount of money on marketing. We have a marketing team that makes the final decisions about our spending, but it is our marketing analytics team that informs the spending recommendationswhere to put that money, how much to put where, and when to increase or decrease spending. Without an impartial marketing analytics group at Stubhub, there is no doubt that our financial returns would be on a different scale entirely.