An overview of marketing analytics

The quote at the beginning of this chapter illustrates one of the fundamental questions of the marketing manager in their day-to-day activities. The best way to evaluate where to spend and target their efforts to achieve their ultimate target is to obtain new customers or retain current ones.

Marketing analytics is nothing more than the application of analytical methods to said goal, bringing a quantifiable way of guiding investment or consumer targeting decisions. As with any new and growing domain, it is hard to pin an exact definition of it, but we can define it as a “technology-enabled and model-supported approach to harness customer and market data to enhance marketing decision making”. Being a domain in the larger field of data analytics, it looks to use mathematics and statistics together with computational tools and techniques to find meaningful patterns and knowledge in data. In this book, we will strive to focus on only...