In combing through newsletters and articles every month, not a week goes by without someone talking about the value of Digital Marketing–web data, ppc, seo, the right way to target online, mobile shopping, the evolution of the web–everywhere we look, myths are being debunked. So it's probably worth discussing what I think is important. In that spirit, here are some thoughts to understand and make better use of web data in digital marketing.

Management

Companies are investing heavily on analytics. Tools. Analysts. Systems. A big bet to get better insights on consumers and make smarter decisions to increase bottom-lines.

This is important for a very simple reason; data drives action. And actions are what impact companies' profits.

But the most important element is management. Managers play the biggest role throughout the process, by framing the important questions so analysts can pull the data using the right tools.

Metrics

A lot of companies are vacuuming up data from their ERP/CRM systems and web analytics sources. A lot of data. But most do not know what to do with it. Almost all reporting you'll see is off "standard reports," usually aggregated data without any segmentation, with very little data visualizations, all from 2003 crystal reports.

As a result, very few companies are able to ride metrics to the bank.

Metrics tell us when it is reasonable to act on the basis of the correlation found in your web data through data visualization.

Innovation

I watched a while back a Google talk on innovation that I think is worth sharing. It talks about 3 types of innovation.

• Incremental innovation
• Incremental innovation with a side effect
• Transformational innovation

We all have the ability to help bring incremental innovation to our organizations though Digital Marketing. We can influence actions using Google Analytics, Optimizely, Marin, Google Trends, Compete, SurveyMonkey, Attention Wizard, and any other tool that can help your company grow.

And if you can lead your team to contribute ideas, customize reports, segment data, dedicate time to data visualization, and figure out what works, you just might get some side effects that can result in transformation.