That being said, there is one thing I'd like to remove from our vocabulary heading into 2013: "Big Data." I've had a similar negative reaction in the past with other industry terms such as "Engagement." The vagueness of these terms has more of a tendency to hurt than help. I've seen a lot of organizations get hung up on trying to define a vague term like this for their business instead of focusing on more high-value areas. As a result, these same organizations tend to mature more slowly than those that avoid pitfalls like this.

Probably the most amusing point to make note of is that "big data" is really no different from the data your organization is currently collecting and has been collecting for years well prior to the inception of web analytics. Is there more data available to organizations now? Yes, of course. However, your Technology team has been building, managing, and maintaining "big data" warehouses in house or in hosted environments for years.

The main reason I wanted to call attention to this is to simply stop you from making a significant investment in "big data" for 2013. Budgets are tight, and I can guarantee you that there are wiser investments that will generate more value for your business. It's not about "big data," it's about the "right data." And ultimately getting that "right data" to the right people at the right time so they can make the decisions necessary to get the quick wins.

I've seen several consulting firms attempt to sell gigantic "big data" projects that will take at least a year to complete and making that the primary focus. That causes a major "time to value" problem for organizations thanks to the long runway for a project of this size and stature. This cannot be your only focus in 2013, as it will cause you to miss out on a lot of quick wins.

Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't be integrating your datasets to help you better analyze and ultimately improve the customer interactions with your business. Integrations are key to your success in 2013. I'm just simply saying that you should give some strategic thought to how to approach this and ultimately take a phased approach with the data that is important to your business. Don't integrate everything, integrate the right things.

So, as you move into 2013, take a moment to reflect on which data is most important for your business and use that as your guide to generate a list of tactics. Don't think about it as "big data," but rather the "right data." Integrations are critical for you this year, and the resulting datasets will be the linchpin for your ability to understand, control, and predict the various customer touch points in your multi-channel landscape.

Bill Bruno, President, Stratigent
Bill has worked actively in the analytics space at Stratigent for over 7 years and currently holds the position of CEO. He currently manages Business Development/Sales, Account Management, Marketing and Strategy. In prior years, Bill has been a consultant and led the Stratigent services team. He has extensive experience helping clients with a wide range of business requirements to optimize their marketing initiatives. Additionally, Bill is viewed as a leader in the space due to his technical background and ability to create and execute actionable strategies for his clients.

He has a true passion for analytics and has spoken on best practices at numerous industry events including eMetrics, Ad:Tech, Content Week, Affiliate Summit, DMA B2B and ACCM, VisCon, Online Marketing Summit, WebTrends Marketing Optimization Tour and many more.

The internet has reshaped the consumer's path-to-purchase more than anything since Bulova aired the first television advertisement in 1941. Although online advertising has been around since Prodigy was promoting Sears' products in the 1980s, measurement efforts have failed to keep up with the evolution of digital marketing and its impact on buyer behavior. The 21st-century consumer is more instrumented, interconnected, and informed than ever, and the "funnel" concept from 1898, used to describe the consumer decision journey, has been replaced by loops, mazes, and clouds!

New media have given consumers new opportunities to evaluate brands and to advocate on their behalf. In fact, the entire consumer decision-making process can be completed online from the time a need is triggered through the purchase and post-purchases stages when a buyer voices her (dis)satisfaction online. While the idea that this journey is no longer linear has been around for years, most efforts at incorporating digital marketing into marketing mix models fail to recognize this fact. Most of today's applications of marketing response models are based on marketing science from the 1960s and 1970s.

Marketing science in the academic arena has evolved tremendously since the first application of marketing mix models in the late 1980s. There are more recently developed econometric and statistical techniques which must be utilized to properly measure the interdependencies among paid, owned, earned, and shared media and their impact on buyer behavior. In today's multiscreen world, a television ad may send a consumer online to conduct a search for more information or directly to the company's website.

She could perhaps make the purchase online and then tell her friends about her purchase through her content-sharing service of choice.

She might print a digital coupon at home to take to the store later or even receive a coupon on her smartphone while she's in the store. When she returns from the store, she could search for a recipe to use the ingredients she just purchased on sale with the digital coupon she found online. She then hops back online to tell her friends about the dish she just prepared. All this activity was triggered by that initial television ad.

In order to give credit where credit is due, one must consider the direct, indirect, and feedback effects mentioned above. That simply can't be accomplished in models that view the consumer decision journey as a linear process. It requires far more than simply adding digital measures alongside offline marketing activities into a single-equation model. With this revised role of marketing, traditional models are struggling to properly measure the impact of digital marketing. It's time to "hit reboot" and to begin leveraging 21st-century analytics to measure marketing's ROI along this new path-to-purchase.

Please feel free to contact me at estacey@stern.nyu.edu with questions or comments.

E. Craig Stacey, PhD
Research Director, NYU Stern Center for Measurable Marketing
Founding Partner, Marketing Productivity Group
E. Craig Stacey, Ph.D., is a recognized expert in the area of marketing productivity analysis with a special emphasis on marketing mix modeling and online versus offline marketing resource allocation. He guides The Center's research direction, and identifies potential research projects. He is a founding partner of The Analytic Consulting Group and previously served as Analytics Director for MarketShare Partners. Prior to joining MSP, he was Managing Partner at ACG Solutions and Industry Liaison for Emory University's Zyman Institute of Brand Science. He was previously employed as Director of Marketing Science for The Coca-Cola Company and as Vice President of Marketing Science at DemandTec. He has also served as Senior Vice President, Analytic Product Management and Development, at Information Resources, Inc. Craig received his Ph.D. in Marketing and Statistics from the University of Alabama, where he specialized in econometric applications of marketplace data.

As an analyst at a marketing agency I get to monitor web analytics on over 200 websites. It's great to query data across many sites to run comparative analysis. Recently I created a segment to track visitors from gaming systems such as Playstation, Nintendo, and Xbox/MCSE. I was very surprised to see that, while this segment is a very small % of overall visitors, on typical site visitors from this segment have been growing rapidly since 2009. I decided to expand the scope of this segment to visitors from devices other than laptops, smartphones, and popular tablets. In the new segment I included visitors from Television based systems (i.e. Google TV) and uncommon mobile devices (i.e. Sony Devices, Kindles, portable gaming devices, small BlackBerrys, etc).

Unsure what I should call this oddball segment, I decided to label as "the others." When I looked at the data across several B2C and B2B websites I saw that the others have been growing by over 100% each year for that past several years.

Does that mean that we need to start designing our sites for the normal laptop/tablet/smartphone displays AND teeny tiny devices AND big screen TVS? Probably not yet. While this segment is growing very rapidly, it is still less than 5% of the traffic on most sites. But the others are definitely coming. In 2013 we will see some interesting product launches such as a new Apply TV system, a new XBOX 720 system, and even Intel has said they will launch web tv system at the upcoming CES. These systems will likely provide enhanced web surfing capabilities on screens with very large displays/resolutions. At this rate the others may account for 7-10% of the traffic on many sites by the end of 2014.

What does this mean for web teams?

In 2013 we need to stop thinking about fixed layout websites that are utilized by visitors with a mouse and keyboard. Buzz phrases such as responsive design, adaptive templates, and liquid layouts have been part of the web team's vocabulary for years. In 2013 we will all need to start honing our skills at sites with more flexible layouts. This will span several roles as designers will need to think about scaling graphics and photos, writers will need to think about how content is perceived as sentences/paragraphs/pages, and engineers will need to think in percentages of height/width rather than aggregate pixels. The sites that will be prized by the largest audiences over the next several years will be adaptable to almost any resolution and will be designed around visitors that are using keyboards, gaming controllers, controller free (i.e. XBOX Kinect), multi-touch displays, or even voice recognition to interact with sites

Mark Ryan, Founder, Extractable
Mark Ryan has an extensive background in web application development, Search Engine Marketing, and Web Analytics. As a founder of Extractable, Mark manages the Strategy, Creative, Engineering, and Project Management groups at Extractable. Mark enjoys working with Web Analytics and sits on various committees of the Web Analytics Association. Mark started his career in Internet development at Applied Materials where he served an integral role in the design and development of the companies first online Inventory and Support Management System. He also developed applications for premiere clients such as Intel, AMD, and Siemens. After Applied Materials, Mark served as Senior Applications Engineer for USWeb's Content Management group and worked on the design and implementation of the company's first web based content management application.