Big Data: How New Technology Is Helping Marketers Create Better Consumer Experiences

The data that consumers are creating is allowing marketers to listen and respond to their customers in ways never before possible. This data set resides in huge clusters of information that paint a picture about what is relevant to users. Data coming from media and advertising, including ad servers like Doubleclick and Microsoft Atlas, will tell us what creative and messages users have been exposed to, how many times, where have they have seen it and if they have clicked to find out more. Site analytics data, coming from web analytics tools such as Google, Omniture and Webtrends, tell us everything from how long people spent viewing content (in more detail than number of pageviews), how often they visit the content, and even what they are searching for and not finding. Finally, social data from Facebook and Twitter can tell us who is in a consumer’s social graph and what brands and content they and their friends like.