My generation is known as the Millennials, which are described as the generation that has an increased use and familiarity with communications, media and digital technologies. Everything revolves around the internet, and therefore it has become more and more important for companies to keep up with their online sites.
Digital analytics is a fairly new industry that has come a long way in a short period of time. It amazes me how much technology is always changing and as I learn more and more about digital analytics, I find myself wondering what it will be like in the future. However, before we can figure out the future of digital analytics, we must first understand the past.
Digital Analytics was originally known as “Web Analytics”, but in 2012 when companies started tracking all things digital (i.e. websites, Facebook, Twitter, loyalty cards, SEO, display ads, mobile applications etc) they decided to change the name. Web Analytics was developed in the beginning of the 2000s, when the Internet started to take off. Marketers were able to finally see if people saw a message thanks to what is known as “log files.” This is when marketers really started using web analytic tools, and there were many to choose from. At this point in the analytics world, the main two companies in digital analytics are Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. Digital analytics is now really starting it get big, and over the next few years it has been predicted that it will become a necessity to everyone in an organisation.
In the next few years there are some things that will happen to shape the future of analytics. In the next couple of months, it is expected that there will be small business analytic tools that are easy to use and don’t need the help of experts to set up. Analytics is extremely important for small business because exploring with different types of marketing tactics takes a lot of time and money and isn’t realistic for small businesses to be able to do.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of connecting any device to the internet with an on or off switch. It is predicted to have the biggest opportunities but also one of the most difficult. With more and more devices being connected to the internet, it opens up the opportunities for new analytics. If this is utilized properly, it could help the overall user experiences and products.
Throughout recent years, wearable technology has become extremely popular with items such as Fitbits and Apple watches, however these new items bring about new challenges to marketers and analytics. Wearables are slowly becoming the future of technology which means that marketers need to find out the best way to analyse human behaviour through all these different wearable items.
The amount of data that is collected from all these different kinds of digital devices is overwhelming and companies can’t keep up with all the data coming. The vice president of analytics at MassMedia, Chris Meares wrote an article about his opinions about the future of digital analytics that I thought was pretty interesting. He said he believes that “No longer will there be a need for a digital analytics tool, such as Adobe or Google Analytics. Instead, companies will collect the data on these digital devices and ship it directly to a data warehouse that is maintained and stored by the organization.” When I read this I thought it was a crazy thought but as I continued to learn more and more about digital analytics and how much is collected everyday from digital technologies, I think that it is a great idea. I agree that 10 years from now once digital analytics has been perfected, the amount of data will be too overwhelming for a company to handle.
Although a lot is predicted to happen in the next couple of years within digital analytics, many agree that 10-15 years from now it will be a lot more advance than it is right now. Technology is constantly changing and we are always coming up with new ideas and ways of doing things. Take phones for example, when the cell phone was introduced in 1973, who would have thought that today we would have touch screen phones that are voice activated that searches the internet and texts for you? Technology is constantly evolving.
No comments:
Post a Comment