In this digital age, there is an unprecedented volume, velocity, and variety of marketing data available to
firms. User characteristics and behaviors are tracked in detail for websites, social media pages, and ad
campaigns, and information-rich user-generated content is contributed at breakneck speed throughout the web.
The marketing world is a-buzz with excitement about using this “big data” to increase profits – yet, many
marketers find real, measurable value-gain to be elusive. It is all too easy to suffer “analysis paralysis” in the
face of a sea of metrics; to make misinformed recommendations based on flawed data or analytics; or in invest
in an analytics tool that makes strong promises but doesn’t deliver actionable insights. At present, Internet
marketing is in the ascendant, and many enterprises are accelerating into this emerging field. For network
marketing, which indicators should we focus on? To what extent has it increased the marketing effect of the
company? Through this lesson, students can clearly understand this knowledge.
Students will learn to evaluate different analytics approaches and will gain hands-on practice gathering and
analyzing large digital data sets containing both structured and unstructured data.
Students will gain experience addressing questions such as: “What is the ROI of my social media initiative?”,
“How should I target my paid ads?”, “What are users saying about my brand?”, and “Should I invest in this
new analytics tool?” In the online marketing budget, nearly 50% is invested in search engine marketing.
How much user attention did these marketing investments bring? To what extent has it increased the
marketing effect of the company?