How accurate is your marketing data?

Source: Ascend2&nbsp;Marketing Data Quality Trends
Recommended Resources: Google Analytics Toolkit

Chart of the Day: The importance of having quality marketing data

Data is the not-so-secret weapon of each and every marketer across the land. Data-driven marketing takes the guesswork out of your daily decision making. Should you place more budget into Facebook Ads, more resource into email marketing or cancel your latest campaign early? It's hard to know unless you have accurate data at hand to inform your decision-making.

In a recent research report, Ascend2 asked marketing influencers "what are the most important objectives of a marketing data strategy?" Leading the way with 62% was improving marketing data quality. This result is encouraging because if you don't have accurate data you could be making worse decisions than if you had no data at all.

In a follow-up question, they asked "What are the most critical challenges to achieving marketing data success?" and found that 46% of respondents were having trouble improving marketing data quality.

This places your marketing data strategy in a tricky situation. The main objective is improving quality but it is also the area that causes the most challenges. In my experience it really is the case - if you have bad data in any of your systems it is fixable going forward so you don't collect any more bad data. But it isn't always possible to clean up the data you already have. This means that you may have to write off your historical data and focus on the future knowing that your data is true.

The takeaway here is that it might be hard and might take time but by making sure you have accurate data is worth its weight in gold.