Learn how to overcome the top challenges facing businesses as they strive to become more data-driven in this eBook.

1. of Data Governance &
Performance Measurement
TOP 3 CHALLENGES

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Table of Contents
Introduction
Top 3 Challenges Facing Data-Driven Businesses
Tag Governance and Performance Measurement
Obtaining a Tag Governance & Performance Measurement Solution
About the Author
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INTRODUCTION
In 2020, customer analytics is more important than ever. In the current landscape,
becoming more data-driven allows businesses to deliver amazing experiences to
their customers and stay competitive in a cutthroat marketplace.
While the upside of becoming data-driven certainly has its reward, there are also
several challenges you can expect to encounter as you improve your data-driven
capabilities. This ebook will address those three main concerns and offer ways to
address them to make sure you stay ahead of the curve.

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Companies working to use data more effectively in
2020 are sure to encounter obstacles as they strive
to improve their use of data. The top challenges
these companies can expect to face are as follows:
Navigating vast amounts of data
Team misalignment
Time and budget allocation
Top 3 Challenges
Facing Data-Driven Businesses
Navigating vast amounts of data
I have good news: all the work put into analytics tech-
nology during the last few decades has paid off, as
businesses are now able to collect unprecedented
amounts of customer data on nearly every element of
their interaction with your brand.
However, all this data comes at a cost, and more data
does not always mean better data. If anything, more
data means more time and resources spent sorting,
cleansing, and understanding that data. The more data
you have, the harder you have to work to ensure data
accuracy.
Furthermore, not all data is created equal, as there are
likely only a few critical customer paths and high-traf-
fic pages on your site. Prioritizing data collection and
analysis outside of these critical site elements can be
a distraction, causing you to sink valuable time and
energy into work that only marginally impacts ROI.
We’ll look at each challenge and how to solve it individually.
Additionally, you can’t ignore the front-end data collec-
tion processes of setting up and maintaining an analytics
implementation.
Analytics implementations for robust websites can be
massively complex—containing thousands or millions
of analytics tags. The sheer volume of tags makes on-
going tag debugging and maintenance a challenging
endeavor, especially since websites and their associat-
ed analytics implementations change frequently.
This challenge is magnified if you’re attempting to man-
age your analytics implementation manually—likely by
using an in-browser analytics debugger—especially
since manual tag management is time consuming and
prone to human error. Moving forward, you will not be
able to adequately manage a robust analytics imple-
mentation manually.

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Team misalignment
A common story in the world of data governance and
measurement is as follows: a team sets up a system
and process to collect and attribute accurate data.
Then at a later date, another team or individual does
something that breaks the system and process be-
cause teams didn’t communicate clearly.
Different teams working on the same campaign, web-
site, or analytics implementation will often have differ-
ing objectives. For example, a marketing team’s objec-
tives around a website and analytics implementation
will likely focus on customer experience and ROI, while
an IT team will be more focused on functionality and
security.
Due to these differing team goals, ongoing blunders
are inevitable if teams fail to align.
Time and budget allocation
Growing your brand by acquiring and retaining cus-
tomers is no easy feat, especially since there are
seemingly endless ways companies can allocate their
time and resources to accomplish those goals. As a
result, this is a serious challenge for many companies,
and especially for marketing leaders.
According to Mikel Chertudi, General Manager of the
Strala Business Unit within ObservePoint, “Heads of
marketing, heads of experience are becoming much
more accountable to the CFO and to the CEO to drive
growth within an organization. And they have to do it
more efficiently.”
A core component of this challenge resides in a com-
pany’s ability to obtain accurate campaign attribution.
Without accurate attribution and ROI, a company lacks
the necessary insights to efficiently allocate budget.
So, how can companies overcome these challenges?
With the help of a tag governance and performance
measurement solution.

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A tag governance and performance measurement
solution enforces data collection standards to ensure
you are collecting accurate data, makes sure you’re
capturing every touchpoint in the customer journey,
and helps you drive growth and ROI with accurate
attribution modeling.
Using this solution can help companies overcome many
of these challenges and accomplish the following:
Prioritize real ROI for marketing technologies
and ensure data accuracy with automated
testing
Align teams on analytics goals and perfor-
mance measurement
Effectively allocate time and budget with accu-
rate attribution
Tag Governance and
Performance Measurement
Prioritize ROI for marketing technologies
and ensure data accuracy with
automated testing
An effective tag governance and performance mea-
surement solution will help companies manage tag-
ging complexity by allowing them to set up standards
for data collection as well as ongoing tagging audits
that ensure their tags are functioning properly in the
correct location.
Let’s break each of these down.
Now, while an effective automated testing solution would
allow you to run tests on your entire site, an all-inclusive
testing strategy of your entire site is not optimal.
Websites are large, and running comprehensive tests on
a regular basis would take excessive time and resources
to execute. Additionally, running all-inclusive tests would
return vast amounts of data to sift through.
Just because you can collect
vast amounts of data does not
mean you should collect vast
amounts of data.
Instead, you should take a more targeted approach
that makes test automation work specifically for your
website’s goals. Your website likely follows the 80/20
rule, in that roughly 80% of your website’s revenue
comes from about 20% of your website’s functionality.
This 20% of your website is where you will want to focus
your testing efforts.

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Prioritize your audits
You don’t have time to sift through loads of low-priority
data. As a result, you will want to minimize the number
of audits while maximizing their impact.
For example, when auditing your website you should
not have more than one or two audits per domain, and
your daily audits should generally not consist of more
than 100 pages. These audits should give you enough
information to gauge the health of your implementa-
tion.
For journeys, you will need to determine the specific
needs of your business and your threshold for risk. As
a rough guideline, you should prioritize running daily
testing journeys on your top 5-10 critical customer ex-
periences, but you could easily have more than that if
your site is especially large or you have a high number
of critical customer experiences. Any other non-critical
journeys should be run infrequently or as you deem
necessary.
Keeping your testing strategy within these recommen-
dations will help you avoid experiencing data overload
and allow you to maintain the functionality of the most
important portions of your website.
Focus testing on your most important pages
and paths
Once you’ve located the web assets that bring in the
most revenue, you will want to prioritize ongoing test-
ing and monitoring on these high-revenue assets with
an automated testing solution like ObservePoint. By
prioritizing your testing, you will be able to obtain the
greatest possible return on your releases and avoid
wasting time and resources.
So how exactly can you efficiently prioritize your efforts?
By:
Prioritizing your audits by testing what’s most
important
ObservePoint’s automated
testing solution gives you
complete freedom to cater
your analytics tests to the
pages and paths on your site
that are driving the most
revenue.

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Your most important web assets likely contain the most
robust portion of your implementation. You probably
have the most vendors and variables working on those
assets. While you could test any of these assets, you
don’t want to test all of them. You need to prioritize.
One way you could approach prioritizing tests would
be to first prioritize by vendor.
Say you have two analytics solutions installed on your
site: a paid solution and a free solution. You would
want to prioritize testing of your paid solution because
of the expected value there.
After prioritizing vendors, you would then need to
identify the most important instances of data collec-
tion to test.
For example, should you test the metrics on your pri-
mary conversion path or on your Contact Us path? This
decision will be based on the relative importance of
each experience.
Approaching tag governance with automation and this
more targeted approach will allow you to efficiently
navigate the problems created by vast amounts of data.
The first step here is to establish communication by
aligning standards, goals, and knowledge between
teams. According to Jim Cain, CEO and Founder of
Napkyn Analytics, aligning these elements requires
leaders of each team to hold meetings specifical-
ly about standards and language. Then these lead-
ers need to work to unite each team on terminology
around KPIs, goals, and terms for how each team con-
ceptualizes different work elements, like what project
completion looks like and which team owns specific
tasks.
When IT, analytics, and marketing teams get on the
same page by uniting on common terminology around
these KPIs, goals, and workflow items, the teams close
communication gaps and effectively improve collabo-
ration.
Next, you’ll want to use an automated tag governance
and performance measurement solution to eliminate
chances of miscommunication and accidental tagging
blunders across teams. This can be accomplished by
setting up the following in your solution:
• Data owners. Setting up data owners will give you
a clear view of who is in charge of what in terms of
data, which will greatly reduce miscommunication
around data-related responsibilities.
• User permissions. Establishing user permissions
within your solution will safeguard your data from
unauthorized use and prevent cross-team data
blunders.
• Notifications. Setting up notifications in your
solution will allow you to be alerted whenever
something changes or goes sour in your tagging
implementation, which will help you quickly re-
solve team alignment and tagging issues when-
ever they arise.
Align teams on analytics goals and
performance measurement
Aligning teams around analytics goals can be accom-
plished through effective communication process-
es and by using a tag governance and performance
measurement solution.

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One great way to ensure quality between IT
analytics and marketing teams is through site
audits with an automated testing solution.
Regularly running automated audits will allow
you to obtain clear, third-party views of your
analytics implementation on an ongoing basis
and ensure communication about your imple-
mentation remains consistent.
ObservePoint provides you with automated
software that allows you to thoroughly audit
your site and monitor your analytics imple-
mentation over time. These site audits are
profoundly helpful when ensuring the quality
of your analytics implementation and when
communicating site expectations with other
teams.
Building an aligned f ramework on
the foundation of analytics test
automation
Align teams with consistent data
standards
Additionally, an automated tag governance and per-
formance measurement solution will allow you to align
teams by developing consistent data standards and
nomenclature across your entire organization.
Through ObservePoint’s tag governance solution, you
can set up Rules to validate that your analytics imple-
mentation is meeting your expectations. These Rules
can be customized within your testing audits to give
a pass or fail indication depending on whether or not
specific analytics tags are functioning properly. The re-
sults of these tests will help you continually ensure the
tags across your site are firing properly in the correct
locations and giving you accurate data as a result.
Additionally, you can set up alerts to notify you imme-
diately if a Rule fails to meet its criteria, allowing you
to keep teams informed and aligned whenever some-
thing in your analytics implementation goes wrong.
You can also use Strala by ObservePoint’s attribution
technology to build standardized tracking parameters
for online and offline data touchpoints. These param-
eters allow you to completely unify your customer
data—before you ever start collecting. As a result, you
will be able to create a unified data strategy, method-
ology, and system across all teams and channels—in-
cluding paid, owned and earned, as well as content.

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Additionally, by using a tag governance and performance
measurement solution, you will be able to move away
from the outdated methods of using spreadsheets to
manage attribution. Instead, you will be able to move to
a more automated platform, which will help you avoid
lost time and the human errors that come with manual
campaign management via spreadsheet.
Overall, the combination of best practices and a tag
governance and performance measurement solution
put data-driven companies in a position to continually
rise above the challenges of today’s customer analytics
world.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “how do I obtain a tag
governance and performance measurement solution?”
Effectively allocate budget with accurate
attribution
In order to allocate time and resources effectively, you
need accurate attribution, which can be accomplished
with the help of a tag governance and performance
measurement solution.
As mentioned previously, Strala by ObservePoint’s
solution enables you to predefine data standards
before you ever start collecting data, allowing you to
ensure unification for all the data you collect—even
offline customer touchpoints. These capabilities will
help you unify accurate data insights throughout all
your campaigns. Then you can use that unified data in
Strala’s algorithmic attribution models, which will help
you understand exactly how to allocate budget to max-
imize your ROI.
Through Strala by ObsevePoint’s unified
data and algorithmic attribution models, you
can visually see exactly where your efforts
are paying off, allowing you to justify your
investments across all channels and content.
Allocate time and resources with
conf idence

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Obtaining a Tag Governance &
Performance Measurement Solution
The first option to obtaining a tag governance and performance measurement solution is to build your own.
Building your own solution
Building a solution yourself is possible but is also a
task of serious magnitude, as doing so would require
individuals with comprehensive expertise in data col-
lection, processing, and querying. You would also need
to consider how to incorporate functional visualiza-
tion, UX/UI, notifications, and reporting functionality.
Also, if you were able to build a solution, you would
need to dedicate manpower to updating and maintain-
ing that solution over time so the solution continues to
adequately serve your needs as time goes on.
Undoubtedly, you would need to dedicate extensive
man-hours and resources to the creation, customization,
and maintenance of such a solution.
The next option for obtaining a tag governance and
performance measurement solution is to purchase a
third-party solution.
Purchasing a third party solution
Due to the labor-intensive nature of building—and es-
pecially, maintaining—an automated testing solution
yourself, you’re likely better off finding a pre-existing
solution, especially since you will be able to configure
and customize a well-made tag governance and perfor-
mance measurement solution to your specific needs at
a much quicker rate than you could ever build one.
Additionally, with a third-party solution, since the third
party has already built the solution, all you need to do
is allocate the manpower to manage it. And in doing
so, the third party will also provide you with supporting
materials to help you get the most out of your solution.
In terms of existing third-party solutions, ObservePoint’s
tag governance platform recently acquired Strala’s per-
formance measurement technology. The two business
units together provide you with everything you need to
ensure your tagging implementation is providing you
with accurate data and that your attribution is giving
you valid insights. To find out how ObservePoint’s tag
governance and performance measurement solution
can help you ensure accurate data collection and attri-
bution throughout your organization:
Schedule Demo

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CHRIS BAIRD
As Vice President of Marketing, Chris Baird is responsible for providing
strategic direction for ObservePoint products, solutions and services, and
for presenting the ObservePoint brand worldwide. He previously held
various marketing positions at Mrs. Fields Brands, Omniture, and Adobe.
About the Author