Unlocking High-Value Insights through Analytics Excellence

As the luxury division of the Croud Group, we benefit from having a team of specialists dedicated solely to Data Analytics, allowing us to help improve our clients’ data efficiencies and capabilities, scaling these efforts across their entire business. As this is a growing topic of interest, we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce our specific model within the Group and how we can support clients with it.

Our wider team’s analytics expertise empowers consequential decision-making, and the approach that our analytics team takes to achieving this is quite straightforward. We provide consultancy and insights, ensuring authentic measurement of ROI and its contributing factors. The significance of accurate measurement is very important, as most insights depend on its precision. 

In the realm of analytics work within agencies and businesses, realising its utmost potential often fails. A main cause of this is the disregard for user stories among analytics stakeholders, with disproportionate attention given to data projects that lack relevance in supporting impactful decisions. Our Group Director of Data Strategy, Kevin Joyner, recently wrote about this in a piece for PMW.

Another factor hindering the optimal outcomes of analytics investments is an incomplete understanding of what defines success in analytics for a business. Our analytics team within the group uses the Modern Analytics Maturity Model to evaluate our clients’ analytics practices and strategically plan our interventions. 

The Modern Analytics Maturity Model

Typically, analytics investments concentrate on defining metrics, data production, and processing. However, the assessment we employ goes beyond these basics. The method our team takes evaluates analytics maturity across six levels and ten attributes, categorised into Data, Culture, and Leadership.

Data: While data often takes the spotlight, maturity in this realm extends beyond sources and infrastructure. It involves the KPIs used for performance evaluation and methodologies for extracting insights. Our team employs tools like the KPIs Impact Matrix to collaboratively plan suitable metrics for specific purposes and stakeholders. As businesses evolve from basic metrics to more strategic decisions, incrementality and causality become pivotal.

Culture: Defined as how analytics is practised within a business, cultural maturity ranges from basic data capture with no clear purpose (Level 0) to serving as the backbone for annual budget planning and strategic decision-making (Level 5). Cultivating maturity in analytics culture revolves around earning trust, showcasing strategic value, and steering analytics toward increasingly valuable applications.

Leadership: Leadership attributes consider the stakeholder levels invested in a business’s analytics practice, from digital campaign managers to CFOs. Maturity in leadership aligns with the altitude of decisions informed by analytics, spanning from tactical adjustments (Level 0) to business-level optimization (Level 5). Leadership also manifests in the availability of skilled analytics personnel, evolving from anyone with spare time (Level 0) to dedicated analysts, data scientists, and engineers (Level 5).

Strategic Planning

Our analytics team as part of Croud, tailors its client plans to align with stakeholders’ requirements for high-value decision-making. Simultaneously, we recognise that features like data integrations and advanced measurement capabilities hold little lasting value if the CMO lacks trust in digital campaign analysis for strategic decision-making.

A key differentiator for our Group’s analytics approach is that it doesn’t elevate the maturity of one attribute without considering the others. For example, our team doesn’t enhance data without addressing culture and leadership. In our consulting endeavours, the Modern Analytics Maturity Model serves as a comprehensive tool for assessing analytics maturity and crafting a roadmap that ensures measurement and insights solutions realise their full potential.

If you’re interested in speaking to a member of our Analytics team about this to understand how you can be unlocking further insights for your brand, please get in touch with us – we’d love to hear from you.