Companies have virtually endless streams of customer data at their disposal and must find a way to gather and analyze the relevant data. This can be useful when measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts and tailoring campaigns and budgets. We already discussed how a comprehensive approach to measuring advertisement is needed. Here is more about how to use data and sophisticated analytics software like the Bloom Intelligence Analytics Dashboard to understand and compare marketing efforts at your company.
Advertising touch points don't work in a vacuum, but it is hard to measure a whole picture. The challenge is to invest correctly across several points to spur action. To do this, a company must use the large amount of customer data they have available and gather the relevant points to assess marketing data for current performance and use data to predict future behavior.
This is more challenging as it sounds of course. As Nate Silver said,
"Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection. Most of it is…irrelevant noise. So unless you have good techniques for filtering and processing the information, you're going to get into trouble."
Companies can build their own systems to filter and process the data while also using the Analytics Dashboard to complement these systems. The information gathered from the Dashboard can be inputted when analyzing marketing efforts.
The tools you use to gather data must also be smart enough to weed through the noise and filter out misleading information. Part of measuring ad performance involves factoring in how outside factors influence sales like the weather, holiday weekends, competitors and the economy.
The Bloom Intelligence software provides an example. This software uses Wi-Fi hotspots to detect electronic devices and generate data about customer visits. One metric is Average Dwell Time. This measures how long a device stays in the broadcast radius. Tracking devices over time allows the software to identify and filter out employees as having staff counted would skew the results. This provides a clearer picture of visitor times, which can be broken down over days, weeks, months or years.
This information can then be used to measure assist rates, or how marketing activities influence each other over different mediums. Assist rates are found by tracking how sales activities and advertising investments change consumer behavior. Essentially, companies can develop a greater awareness of how advertising drives in-store and online sales.
Some forms of advertisement have less potential for direct interaction like with billboards and radio, magazine and TV ads. However, a new ad across one of these mediums could lead to an analysis of sales. This lets companies catch the affect an ad has by monitoring a jump in searches, online clicks, email openings, sales and more after it launches.
Quantifying this data allows for better business planning. Every business driver can be given an elasticity rating. This ratio explains the percentage change in one variable to the change in percentage in another variable. Companies can then run scenarios to view how making changes to different driver budgets will affect sales.
HBR refers to this process as "war gaming." Ford used war gaming to measure market receptiveness to fuel efficiency. They then redirected advertising resources to create media campaigns targeted to the markets receptive to this message.
When going from theory to practical application, the Bloom Intelligence Analytics Dashboard is there to monitor the results. It collects customer data and can be used to assess whether marketing efforts were successful. 
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