The early 20th-century department store magnate, John Wanamaker, who famously said, “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half,” couldn’t have imagined the analytical power of today’s innovative artificial intelligence (AI) tools for marketers.
NB: This is an article from VisionEdge Marketing
Google Analytics is the single-most popular website analytics tool on the market–it is used by more than half of all websites. But if you are one of the millions of marketers who use Google Analytics, you know that although it provides a lot of data, it doesn’t reveal any real insights. It will show you a lot of numbers related to your site traffic, but it doesn’t tell you what the data means or what to do with all of that information.
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Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook provide their own metrics regarding your account activity and engagement. Your CRM or marketing automation system supplies additional data.
There are dashboarding tools like Cyfe, Klipfolio, and Supermetrics, as well as Tableau at the enterprise level, that will pull together data from a variety of sources and display it in charts and graphs. But they still don’t tell you what to do based on those visualizations.
Until recently, interpreting all that data and turning it into actionable intelligence required hiring a data analyst. These uniquely skilled individuals are hard to find and command hefty salaries.
But a new crop of tools is bringing intelligent data analysis within reach of any size company and the marketing agencies that serve them. By applying AI to website, email, and social media metrics, these tools turn raw data into useful insights and actionable intelligence available to almost anyone. Here’s a look at several popular and emerging options.
Entry Level AI Marketing Tools
These tools analyze your Google Analytics data and optionally integrate with additional datasets including social media platforms and CRM systems. All three offer a free trial as well. If your organization is just getting started using AI for marketing analytics, these platforms are worth a look
PaveAI
PaveAI turns Google Analytics into reports with AI insights and summaries for agencies and SMBs. It also integrates with Google Search Console and the most popular social media networks.
Its data science algorithm takes into account goals set up in Google Analytics—whether to increase revenue, leads, or engagement—and looks at over 16 million possible combinations across all marketing channels to identify the most important correlations. These personalized insights are then presented in a report that can be easily edited. Agencies can also let PaveAI know about their ongoing campaigns and have those specific insights and summaries automatically generated, helping to save time and increase client retention.
Clickvoyant
According to Clickvoyant CEO Mia Umanos, “The promise of big data has been a big disappointment. I’ve been in analytics for 15 years. In that time we went from 150 technologies to 8000. This industry is worth billions, and yet few are satisfied. That’s because most SaaS assume an analyst at the other end. These platforms promise to make the analyst faster at analyzing.”
But the role of data analyst is one of the most difficult and expensive to fill. In fact, per Umanos, “There is a huge gap in analytics talent right now. There is no one available to take those jobs. If only 70% of enterprise can fill their open data roles, the rest of us get boxed out of talent.”
Clickvoyant aims to democratize marketing analytics. Its AI platform scans data from Google Analytics and other sources, and in just 10 minutes produces a slide report containing insights such as “In the last 30 days, 97% of revenue was generated by only 3% of products,” and “These 10 pages are rarely part of conversions. Review this content.”
Narrative BI
Narrative BI is a no-code augmented analytics platform for growth teams that automatically turns raw data into actionable narratives.
It integrates with existing data sources such as marketing, CRM, and Google Analytics, and automatically detects anomalies and correlations in the company data. Narrative BI delivers analytics insights across the organization, enabling wider adoption of advanced analytics across teams.
Narrative BI for Google Analytics is a free self-service integration of Narrative BI with Google Analytics. Narrative BI for GA helps you stay updated on the most important metrics and anomalies in your website data. It’s a great way to check out the tool, providing quick insights like “On January 22, 2022 number of page views increased by 10% (148) compared to January 15, 2022 (134),” backed up with charts.
Enterprise-Level Tools
These tools are priced for midsized and large companies but integrate with a wider range of data sources and provide more in-depth insights from large data sets.
Click360
What marketers really want to know is what sequences of events most commonly lead to sales. Last-click attribution models fail to capture the chain of events that end in purchases.
Click360 is an end-to-end marketing analytics platform that combines multi-touch attribution, segmentation, and predictive analytics to help sales and marketing teams understand which customers are most likely to convert to revenue based on behavior, and the channels that best convert those customers.
It uses a form of AI called deep learning to recognize the patterns and sequences of behavior that indicate buying intent in real-time, then groups those customers by those behaviors so that marketers know how to best engage each customer and personalize sales and marketing funnels at scale, as well as how to optimize ad spend to maximize return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
Arria
Arria NLG integrates with web analytics, business intelligence (BI) tools, Excel files, and other data sources to turn data into descriptive narratives using a subset of AI called natural language generation (NLG).
The company’s software replicates the human process of analyzing and communicating data insights to communicate advanced knowledge and understanding in natural language, at machine speed.
Industry analyst firm Forrester found that “Arria NLG customers achieved an 80% reduction in manual work, enablement of machine-level scaling, and the distribution of more efficient, accurate, and connected insights across their organizations,” as well as time savings of up to 60% for analysts and decision-makers.
NLG can also help content and email marketers by generating localized, personalized content that is relevant and significant to individual customers and prospects. Marketers can work from pre-defined projects to ensure content has a consistent voice free from errors.
Industry-Specific Tools
While most AI tools for marketing analytics are designed to work across different types of companies, an emerging class of applications offer deep capabilities for specific segments.
One example is Actium Health’s CENTARI CRM intelligence platform for healthcare systems. It enables patient outreach professionals in midsized organizations to automatically communicate the most timely and relevant messages to patients in order to optimize outcomes while reducing the total cost of care.
Actium solves the problem of data overload for healthcare marketers (and communication overload for patients) by applying AI across a healthcare system’s siloed, local data sets to determine and automatically communicate the “best next action” to patients on an individual level.
Another example is SendSquared in the hospitality sector. It enables resorts, hotels, spas, and vacation rental management companies (VMRCs) to send personalized offers to the guests most likely to respond to them.
It integrates with and uses data from popular property management systems to customize offers based on what appeals to individual guests, though the company does not use the term AI to describe its underlying technology.
Wrapping Up
AI is often portrayed in movies and literature in frightening ways—as technology that will either wipe out massive swaths of knowledge worker jobs, or worse, take over the world.
The reality for marketers today is much less threatening and more empowering. AI isn’t eliminating the jobs of marketers, but rather helping them to do their jobs more effectively. It can glean actionable insights from massive data sets in a matter of minutes, empowering marketing professionals to make better informed decisions, faster.
AI tools for marketing analytics are giving agencies, SMBs, enterprises, and marketers in specific industry segments powerful new capabilities to analyze data in order to send the right messages to the right prospects at the right time.
