Why and How to Create a Data Analytics Maturity Model

By consolidating your reporting, you’ll be able to surface insights clearly and quickly.

Launching ads across digital channels, optimizing campaigns, managing client expectations — advertising operations involves a lot of moving parts. And getting a clear view into what’s working and what isn’t can feel nearly impossible. That’s where your analytics model, or analytics framework, comes in.

Analytics model streamlines the way you gather, analyze, and learn from your data. It empowers your team to glean more insights with less effort. And it’s critical to the health of your advertising operation.

But what is an analytics model? What should it look like? And how does it improve efficiency? Read on for the answers.

What is an analytics model?

An analytics model puts systems in place that empower your team to make informed optimizations on ad placements in an efficient way. In other words, it’s the framework for data analytics that your advertising operations team puts in place.

Each analytics model should include:

• a documented process,
• ad reporting software,
• organizational buy-in,
• a learning culture.

The exact analytics model varies based on the business, because every business has unique reporting needs. What works for your business may not work for the next. But you can follow these loose guidelines to build the model that works for your team.

What are the benefits of a strong analytics model?

Your analytics strategy should support your business, not work against it.

87 percent of companies believe their analytics strategy didn’t provide optimized business outcomes.

Improve your analytics model to strengthen processes for your team members while elevating data integrity to the highest standards. Here’s what you can achieve:

1. Less time spent reporting

Most data analysts spend 80% of their time cleaning, organizing, and pulling data — and only 20% of their time on analyzing it. Don’t accept this 80/20 balance for your business.

A more sophisticated approach to analytics will help automate and streamline your reporting process. A Burt Intelligence customer, for example, moved from spending six hours each day on reporting to two minutes.

2. Boosted revenue

A mature analytics model provides your team with more accurate data, so teams can help boost revenue by:

• making precise adjustments to campaigns, rather than guesses,
• hitting goals without overdelivering ad space,
• freeing up ad inventory.

3. Maximized advertiser insights

Improve your analytics model to more easily serve advertisers with better insights. Your business will be able to:

• increase client satisfaction with data quality by 75%,
• provide faster or real-time business insights,
• better forecast bandwidth to take on more accounts and upsell current ones,
• increase renewal rates by over 5% thanks to an improved customer experience.

4. Improved employee efficiency

Your analytics model can free your team to focus on value-creating activities. Analysts can work on strategic projects like optimizing ad inventory delivery. Manual reporting can become a minimal part of their day-to-day. Analysts can finally fulfill the potential of their role. You’ll see higher morale, higher employee referral rates, and lower voluntary leave rates as a result.

Getting started: How to improve your analytics model

The Deloitte study outlines four levels of analytics maturity: nascent, developing, mature, and leading. To build a leading analytics model:

1. Document your analytics process

Processes are only as strong as the teams that use them. Document reporting workflows (and keep it simple). Integrate processes at scale across every team’s existing workflows by:

• holding semi-regular trainings on your reporting workflow,
• hosting regular office hours to help employees with the reporting workflow,
• posting your documented process on widely accessible resource centers.

2. Secure internal buy-in

For your analytics model to truly impact your organization, each team needs to buy into the model. Your model isn’t just for your business intelligence team. Sales, marketing, operations — everyone needs to be speaking the same language and sourcing insights from the same place.

3. Support a culture of learning

Establish a regular cadence of sharing insights and making data-backed decisions. Here are some ways to get started:

• hold regular meetings devoted to discussing results,
• integrate pre-launch and post-mortem meetings into each campaign,
• use easily shared dashboards and reports,
• set up an email alias for everyone interested in getting regular reporting insights.

Building an analytics model is quite an undertaking in itself, but you don’t have to do it on your own. At Burt Intelligence, we partner with businesses to transform data into a strategic advantage. Our advertising reporting platform is built with your efficiency and success in mind:

• robust integrations so you can pull all data into one place,
• unified reporting views combining programmatic and direct advertising data,
• data visualization tools to surface trends,
• automated reports to reduce manual entry.

With Burt, you can improve your analytics model today.