You don’t just have a website anymore, you’ve got a marketing cloud…
Of course, with all the fluff and fuss over cloud technology out there, you may be wondering, what exactly constitutes a marketing cloud? Well, all of the integrated marketing tools that your company may use to connect with customers and drive demand – advertising, targeting, social media, marketing automation, search, analytics, etc. – make up a unique (and very complex) digital marketing system untethered to any one particular place or person… in other words, a cloud. Without proper management, though, the digital marketing cloud can get a little out of hand. In some cases, it can cost you revenue via poor site performance or bad customer experiences. Worse, it can even open the door to uninvited guests and nefarious intruders. How can this be?
The biggest problem with your marketing cloud is that along with the vendors and service providers you’ve knowingly integrated, there can also be vendors or service providers who, unbeknownst to you, have come along for the ride. Without effective monitoring or management, you may not even know they’re there.
Imagine you are planning a summer barbecue and you invite 20 carefully chosen guests to attend. Next, imagine that each of these guests, without any warning, shows up with four more people. Now, you have 100 people sitting down at a table set for 20.
This out-of-control party is essentially what can happen to your marketing cloud without the right kind of maintenance and management.
At Ghostery, we were able to aggregate data from more than 26 million web sites, and our findings revealed:
- On average, 70 vendors have access to a typical Fortune 500 company website.
- Only 20% of the vendors with access to a website were actually invited directly by the publisher – about 14 vendors.
- The remaining 80% obtained access indirectly through another vendor – about 56.
Considering the high rate of change in marketing, and the ever expanding multi-channel environment in which marketers operate, it’s easy to see how marketing clouds have gotten this clustered. In fact, according to Aberdeen Group’s Marketing Analytics: Crunching Numbers, Winning Customers report, 45% of marketers cited that their top marketing pressures tie back to a combination of increasingly competitive business objectives and customer demands from digital channels.
Maximizing the ROI from your Marketing Cloud
Ultimately, the profitability of your web presence is only as good as the functionality of the tools and technology with which it’s built. To help maximize the ROI of your marketing cloud, here are a few effective tactics:
- Prevent security breaches – Having non-secure elements such as tags on secure or mixed-content pages exposes a company’s data to hackers. Recently, theReuters hack through Taboola this past June serves a poignant example of how non-secure elements can lead to such exposure. Paired with Google’s recent announcement that secure web pages will gain a higher search ranking, and it’s pretty clear why marketing cloud security is vital.
- Reduce site latency – Our research shows that adding a single new marketing tag to a site increases the page latency (time to load) by 5%. Paired with Aberdeen’s findings that 25% of users will abandon a page after just three seconds of delay, it’s clear how critical it is to keep every component of your marketing cloud up to speed.
- Ensure data governance – Own your contract relationship. Set guidelines for vendor activities, and ensure SLAs are being met in terms of latency, data resell, and third party vendors permitted.
Any major event or venue — be it a BBQ, a wedding, or your web presence — requires careful selection of vendors. For your marketing cloud, when you keep a close eye on your vendors, and maintain open lines of communication, however, you can enjoy the promise of integrated marketing technology without the worry of any uninvited guests.
Emily Riley, COO of Ghostery leads marketing and product for the company. As a longtime Forrester analyst, Riley ran the interactive marketing research group. More recently, she drove Audience Science’s transformation from an ad network into an enterprise marketing technology business. Emily earned a bachelor’s degree from The Johns Hopkins University.
