• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, January 15, 2014

Marketers have tamed Big Data -- or at least they are trying to -- with automation. But not everything has been automated yet, which is why humans are looking to real-time analytics to help them do -- and maybe keep -- their jobs.

As a result, real-time analytics are currently winning the race for the “it” thing of 2014.

That’s one reason Netmining, a real-time audience-targeting solutions provider, is releasing a new dashboard to provide its clients with real-time data. The dashboard lets advertisers see how their display campaigns are performing without having to wait for manual reports.

Joe Lavan, Netmining’s data and insights director, and Lynda Liu, the company’s marketing manager, gave me a demo of the platform.

Previously, the data was available via weekly or bi-weekly reports. The new dashboard is accessible at any time and features visually engaging charts and graphs with data on the previous day, the previous week or the previous month.

One area I was given a demo on was the dashboard’s retargeting data. It shows time-to-conversion (from when the consumer was first retargeted) and time-of-conversion (time of day). Marketers can compare how their campaigns are doing in relation to others within a respective vertical. Lavan said Netmining made it easy to compare yourself to peers to help marketers find out if they are missing out on something others are capitalizing on. 

One interesting note: after one-plus week, retargeting campaigns don’t seem to work, at least for the particular data set I saw. However, Lavan pointed out that time-frame data usually varies based on vertical and product.

“For example, it probably doesn’t take you more than a week to buy a t-shirt,” he said. “It does vary client to client, but for long-tail sales (B2B, auto), retargeting can work after a week.”

There are plenty of other trends to look at on the new dashboard, including device-level data, geographic data and ad distribution (size of ad) data. However, Lavan acknowledged there are still improvements to be made, particularly for device-level data.

Regardless, it’s clear how data like this can and will be used to make important decisions; it’s just up to the marketer to actually take action. As Russ Ayres of IXI put it: there’s a considerable difference between real-time decisioning and real-time action.

“When data is visualized and in your face, I think that’s when it becomes something advertisers use,” said Lavan. “It goes from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have.”

“Don’t leave it all up to the machines” is a credo many have heard. But in order to live that doctrine, humans need to use real-time data in a way machines can’t. That’s the hard truth.