In-House Analytics Skills: Not a Luxury

Many companies spending significant dollars in digital marketing do not have an in-house analytics team.  Some have no staff capable of using analytics data to drive marketing decisions.  This makes no sense to me.

Even if your digital marketing programs are entirely managed by an agency, in-house analytics capabilities are critical.

• You can’t manage an agency effectively and give them good direction if you don’t have the ability to make sense of results data;
• Allowing the agency to make the decisions about future expenditures based on their interpretation of results data (whether it is your data, their data or vendor data) is allowing the fox to guard the hen house; Agencies have a vested interest in masking poor results
• Multiple sources of data are necessary to make good decisions:  Web Analytics data, data from vendors, CRM data, sales data, etc.  An agency can’t (and shouldn’t) be responsible for connecting those data dots.

For digital marketers, analytics is like breathing.  Nothing else in the body functions in the absence of breathing.   No matter how hard you try, breathing cannot be outsourced.   This is true regardless of whether digital marketing is accomplished by an in-house team or outsourced to an agency.

Budgets have been cut for everyone, no doubt, but skimping on analytics capabilities is penny wise and pound foolish.