Last week, I had the opportunity to join about 60 data professionals during AMIN Worldwide’s Data Distillery conference. I was asked to participate in a panel discussing “The Future of Analytics” where we would discuss AI’s impact on analytics and our jobs, GA4’s future in the industry, the cookie conundrum and how data professionals can set themselves apart in the future I initially felt a twinge of imposter syndrome kicking in, but I quickly realized I have plenty to contribute to the discussion and decided to say YES.

So, what was my POV on the future of marketing analytics? Let me recap!

1. AI makes corporate life a little harder

We all know shoppers’ expectations have risen thanks to some of their experiences with the big, best-in-class brands. I believe that AI tools like ChatGPT are changing the expectations in the world of business. Generative AI usage is becoming more and more prevalent amongst marketers and this is teaching our colleagues that getting answers to their questions should be fast and easy. They are being trained out of using something like a dashboard and a report where you must click several times to get to what you need. 

If we analytics professionals want to ensure our colleagues continue to use the data we provide, we must explore ways to create dialogues with our business and campaign data, making it possible to ask a question and get an answer just as easily as ChatGPT. Several options are emerging including new tools like Anova.ai, and integrations into tools we already use like Tableau AI. Our agency is continuing to keep our eye on this trend, looking at ways to make data retrieval simpler for our end user and making sure all of this follows a privacy-first approach.

2. AI allows data professionals to take data-based recommendations from A to Z

Generative AI can help business professionals work more efficiently and spark new ideas, but one of its biggest advantages is giving people access to skills they may not have. For example, Gatesman has been using it to help our data analysts better present their recommendations in a digestible way. AI has allowed our team to analyze data and identify opportunities, while creating compelling visuals that show what those recommendations could look like in practice. This makes our insights more actionable, as it's no longer just text on a page but a visual plan that brings our ideas to life.

3. We’ve all experienced GA4 challenges, but there are some positives

GA4 has undoubtedly been a negative topic for a while. Causing businesses to have to make the switch from UA to GA4, causing web developers and analysts to sweat as they try to learn the evolutions, and causing analysts endless stress trying to find or understand new metrics. Our biggest challenges have been in educating clients, finding the data we want, sampling issues and finding good documentation. Our initial priority was to create customized dashboard views in Looker or Explore reports to work around the challenges we've faced in finding the information we need.

The biggest positive that’s come up has been the integration with BiqQuery. We have implemented pulling raw data feeds from GA4 into BigQuery which helps us get around sampling issues and allows for more user-based analytics and insights. Another positive that we must recognize is that Google is continuing to develop and bring advanced features to GA4. Our approach will be to keep up-to-date with updates to leverage all new features and continue to build out BiqQuery use cases. 

4. GA4 is not going anywhere, but there are tools to consider adding to your stack

With all of the complaints around GA4, it’s easy to ask ourselves if there are alternatives or if Google is the future of web analytics. While there are alternatives on the market to explore, we recognize the beast that is Google. As of January 2024, over 55% of all websites use GA4, having almost 90% market share. The reality is that it’s far too big and powerful for agencies to walk away from, Gatesman included as nearly every single client or prospect we have uses GA4. So, we will also use GA4. What we will NOT do is simply rely on ONLY GA4. 

We’ve found that GA4 is a great tool for us to monitor campaigns and create “counting metrics” (how many users are we getting on the website from our ads, how many are clicking or converting). However, when we focus on creating recommendations for the website itself, we’ve found that a more impactful approach is typically through other tools. Specifically, we find UX tools that provide session recordings and heatmaps have similar information, but show our clients the issue more easily. We also leverage A/B testing tools to provide our clients with data-based optimizations for their landing pages. So, while we are keeping our eye on the alternatives for web analytics, we have been investing our time ensuring our full digital analytics toolbox is in place for each client.

5. Who cares if the 3^rd party cookie is staying or going, we should be building out options

We’ve all been talking about the degradation of the 3rd party cookie for many years now. Google recently announced that they are no longer going to remove them, but yet provide the user more transparency and options. While this initially sounds like “Yay! Cookies are no longer going away,” we have to remember that many browsers and users have already moved away from cookies. With that in mind, Gatesman has been operating with the approach that we need to use multiple avenues. 

In reporting and analytics, we recognized early on that attribution was becoming increasingly complex due to user choice, data privacy, and cookie limitations. As a result, we've adopted multiple methods to derive insights for our campaigns. While we use attribution data to optimize in real time, we also implement media mix modeling to measure broader trends against business outcomes. This ensures we can allocate budgets effectively without relying solely on attribution. The truth is, there’s no single solution for measurement today or in the future, so we will continue using multiple methodologies to make the best data-driven decisions.

6. An analyst is also a strategist

With all of these complicated shifts in the analytics industry, it’s easy to ask ourselves about the role that analytics professionals will play in the future. It’s apparent that Generative AI has become very sophisticated and can generate the code or technical product I once would have done myself. Before that, there were predictive analytics tools that could model better than I could. Additionally, there were recommendation engines that could suggest what a customer or user would want next better than I ever could. All this continues to reinforce that the value we add analysts is not on the nitty-gritty coding work. Instead, the value is knowing how to USE analytics techniques and applying them to the business or marketing programs. This has always been true, but never more so than today. The Gatesman analytics team will continue to shift into the role of a digital strategist. We will continue to seek analytics evolutions, but do so with the primary goal to support our clients' strategies. 

As we look ahead, we'll continue to keep our eyes open and test out options as new topics surface. Feel free to reach out to discuss any challenges or successes so we can continue to learn from each other!