Data silos generally refer to a particularly insidious issue in marketing intelligence that has arisen from the precambrian explosion of channel-specific systems over the past 20 years. As the number of ways for a marketer to reach their audiences through digital media have grown (and continues to grow), point solution systems have emerged to supply planning, workflow and optimization tools for those channels. These tools have generated an ever-growing mass of data, and marketing organizations have typically kept these point solution data as separate siloes to keep their channel teams’ management and optimization processes streamlined.
Unfortunately, data silos gave rise to a number of problems that have gotten in the way of providing reliable marketing intelligence (and many marketing intelligence systems have simply ignored many of these problems)
* No Omni-channel View – When data remains fragmented in siloes, then marketing leaders are not able to truly understand, at a holistic level, everything that is going on across their media. Many marketing organizations have taken to exporting reports from different systems, and manually patching together reams of unreconciled Excel spreadsheets together, an error-prone and time consuming task that often arrives too late after campaigns are already over, all in order to simply understand what is happening at a high-level
* Duplicated, Unreconciled Data – Most systems have mechanisms to optimize for their own channel. These often require firing a conversion tag when a user reaches a success event within the advertiser’s website or mobile app. Unfortunately, each channel system is firing and measuring its own conversion events in an unreconciled way, leading to each channel system claiming credit and resulting in the over-counting of conversions.
* Potential Bias – Several channel systems have stepped forward to offer themselves as a solution for consolidated channel tracking, but many of these systems are owned by enormous media owners. If the systems that are evaluating performance are also owned by the media owners who are being evaluated, then the potential for introducing bias is great
