Building a Digital Analytics Organization: Create Value by Integrating Analytical Processes, Technology, and People into Business Operations

11. Targeting and Automation with Digital Analytics

Targeting your business with input from digital analytical data is possible in 2013. No longer a nascent idea being sold by startups, many digital analytics platforms, such as Webtrends or IBM, have products focused on using digital data to identify an audience with specific attributes and send, often in real time, relevant information and content—where the information and content being sent may be an online ad, content inserted onto a page, an email, an in-application message, and so on.

Many businesses target using data in many ways, often with manual intervention to do so. Take for example the types of targeting that companies like Google and Yahoo do for paid search—targeting within search ...