• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, September 10, 2010

The amount of money spent by U.S. marketers to gather online data describing digital audience characteristics, transactions and "clickstream" behaviors will more than double over the next two years, reaching $840 million in 2012, according to new projections from the Winterberry Group.

The growth in spending on digital marketing data will account for nearly all the projected increase in spending on marketing data in general, which is set to increase from $7.8 billion in 2009 to $8.0 billion in 2012 -- offsetting modest declines in traditional (offline) data spending.

Above all, the new spending on digital marketing data reflects the continuing growth of online advertising -- including online display as well as e-mail and other integrated media, according to Winterberry, which conducted its study on behalf of Acxiom Corp., specializing in marketing data, services, and technology, and Netezza Corp, targeting data warehouse and analytic appliances.

Much of this spending will be focused on "pushing the boundaries of what's now possible with respect to targeting and optimization," according to Bruce Biegel, a managing director at Winterberry Group.

Biegel went on: "This has the potential to make online acquisition and engagement channels significantly more effective and accelerate the shift of even more advertiser spending from traditional to online channels."

Generally, Winterberry says the focus of digital data investment is shifting from applying direct mail-style marketing principles to e-mail, affiliate marketing and search -- which dominated spending over the last couple of years -- to new areas, including Web site optimization, lead generation and real-time media buying.

It sees this next wave of spending benefiting new players in the marketing data arena, including online data compilers and exchange platforms, database management vendors, publishers, and e-commerce platforms, as well as a growing variety of technology-focused performance optimizers.