Being in extended lockdown has changed consumer behaviour forever.
Adoption of digital behaviours and value based consumption has increased at an unprecedented rate. This shift, that happened almost overnight, has put pressure on consumer businesses to speed up their digital transformation, adopt advanced analytics and automate decision making to keep up with these new demands.
In the last 12 months, marketing leaders have really understood the importance of extracting ai. The Marketing Technology Survey published by Gartner earlier this year reports that 49% of martech leaders think advanced analytics and automated decision making are the emerging technologies that will have the greatest positive impact on their company’s marketing efforts in the next 5 years.
Marketing and analytics leaders come to us asking for a data analysis solution that lets them quickly answer questions like:
- Why is our customer retention rate dropping?
- What’s driving customer upgrades?
- Which campaigns can deliver revenue targets without depleting the budget?
There are many advanced ai analytics solutions out there. Some are great at real- time data monitoring and alerting users of outliers in their data. Email alerts, automatically triggered when metrics change, are an amazing replacement for manual monitoring that humans had to do before the wonder of Machine Learning came to help.
But knowing that something has changed in your metric is only part of the story.
Knowing that your customer retention rate is dropping is great but to be able to act upon it you need to know why, so you can stop the metric from dropping.
Not having an automated way to explain the why, to get to the root cause of the problem, means that a data analyst still has to spend lots of time conducting extensive analyses to identify why there is unusual behaviour in the metric.
Taking the traditional approach to answer important business questions means pulling in large amounts of data from multiple systems. It means building lots of charts in a dashboard to test theories and convey results – and only getting these hours or even days later. This long process limits business impact.
That’s why we haven’t stopped at Anomaly Detection and have invested in creating Root Cause Analysis.
Root Cause Analysis, based on Machine Learning algorithms, is an automated way to identify business areas and operational factors that drive a change in a metric – and to understand the impact on the overall performance.
To give an example let’s think about a clothing retailer and the metric “Sales Generated”.
I set a user alert on this metric. So Avora continuously monitors this KPI – and when the smart algorithms detect an anomaly in the data, I get a message saying that the performance of “Sales Generated” is worse or better than expected.
This information gives me a starting point but it doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do with it. That’s a job for root cause analysis.
What the algorithm does is take into account all possible factors behind the decline in sales, by cutting and slicing data.
For humans it takes hours or days: for the ML algorithm it takes seconds.
And here you go in seconds I get a waterfall chart that shows me the sales generated before and after, and all of the factors (all the customer journey steps): Media spend, CPM, Click Through Rate, Conversion rate, Average Order Value, that have influenced the change in sales.
In this example the conversion rate had the biggest negative impact on sales. Knowing that potential customers were clicking on the advert but they weren’t following through to make a purchase is good.
But we can do better.
We can drill into that conversion rate and see specifically which products and brands caused the decline in conversion rate.
We can go further and add marketing channels to the analysis so we can find out which ones have performed particularly badly (or well!).
In this economy, the winners are those who can make quick decisions and not waste money.
This information allows me to immediately stop advertising the products and brands that aren’t converting and stop investing in channels that aren’t performing.
We passionately believe that marketing teams that have to deal with the challenges of the “new normal” should be able to get answers to their questions by themselves.
They should be able to change the hours and days it’s taking to get answers to seconds.
They should have the power to find out “why” their metrics are off track before it’s too late.
We know by looking at our customers’ experiences that we haven’t just built an analytics solution but a source of competitive advantage for your organisation.
The numbers speak for themselves.
By using Avora our customers typically achieve an increase of 120% in customer engagement, 10% drop in cost per acquisition and a reduction of 95% in time to report.
Come and see how fast you can create your market advantage.