A recent article in the Harvard Business Review on Advertising Analytics 2.0 shows how advanced analytic tools and concepts can improve the return from your growth efforts. The article, written by Wes Nichols of MarketShare, shows how ad channels increasingly interact with each other and you can be much more effective by understanding these interactions. What you do in performance marketing, search ads, web, YouTube, TV and PR are not independent of each other. For example, a TV advertisement may increase Google searches that are then directed to your web game by purchasing ad words.
Advanced analytics allow you to understand these interdependencies and allocate accordingly. For example, one company found 85 percent of its budget went to TV ads and six percent to YouTube ads but the YouTube ads were nearly twice as effective at driving search. They then changed their allocation of ad dollars. This adjustment increased sales nine percent without incurring any additional advertising expense.
One of the keys to using analytics more effectively is understanding what data to collect. Many in the game industry think that tracking clicks on cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns, adding some consumer surveys, focus groups and last-click attribution is enough to optimize their marketing. It is not. Continue reading “Using analytics to optimize all of your advertising spend”
The Business of Social Games and Casino 