Time Is Critical Data Metric For Search Marketers

Clock-B3Tying together data from time, place, campaigns, strings, visits and customers are trends driving the next generation of successful search marketing campaigns.

The most important of all is structuring data across time, according to Paul Barrett, senior manager of the Big Data Practice at Accenture Interactive, who spoke at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit keynote on Tuesday.

Barrett said time is one of the most important elements of data to analyze, such as how and when people talk about their experiences. Marketers will want to tie specific times to different outcomes in a customer life cycle. Time could make features like Facebook's or Twitter's timeline more important to marketers.

If and when Google and Bing build real-time ad targeting into search ad platforms, time will become even more important.

Increasing the value of search marketing will come from data in geographic location, social, interest and intent, industrial Internet, smartphone data, shopping and offline and financial data.

The biggest changes will come from multistructure data, new economics in storing and managing information. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and others will invest millions this year in state-of-the-art data centers to support this trend.  

If you can't access data, you can't explore it -- a missed opportunity. Predictive modeling supports the change through sentiment analytics used to analyze what is being communicated. While text analytics may count words or keywords, sentiments seek to understand what's being said. Sentiment, along with analyzing time, produces insights not previously available.

Data provides the insights through consumer connections and purchases. It means connecting the sales and product supply chain into search. Barrett said as social media grows in importance, analyzing customer conversation will become critical to search marketers as they analyze time.

Visualizing the time series gives marketers another way to analyze their journey through the purchase funnel.

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