The sustained ability for visualisation and insights

We’ve previously spoken about the tracking and tagging considerations for monitoring engagement around sustainability content and messaging – primarily in terms of results from digital channels and website. As a strand of insights, sustainability is a great example of how group and brand level reporting can be segmented in new ways that complement and support, purely location-based and product-level data.  

A recently published Sustainability Report from HomeViews highlights demographic and geographic nuances in perspectives on the importance of difference factors. Ultimately, it supported the central findings of Space & Time’s Sustainability and the Homebuyer research piece, and found that 72% of surveyed buyers and tenants valued sustainable building features.  

Making customer attitudes and interaction a more central, ongoing and automated part of your reporting can be achieved to a very basic extent through custom reports and explorations in Analytics. But as we’ve discussed, this dataset offers only a very limited view of consumer engagement: there are vitally important learnings that can be gleaned from other data signals created at other points of contact along the consumer journey. 

Understanding these growing motivations at a local level for improved customer experience and media output requires the merging of multiple data sources. Connecting those to a business intelligence / data visualisation platform is a starting point, but will usually find limitations in terms of creating combined blended measurements, finding the right native data connectors or segmenting in a way that meets the needs of all stakeholders in the business. For these reasons, connecting data sources to a data warehouse first, and transforming it to create unique reporting layers with common product, campaign and location identifiers suddenly becomes crucial. 

What data? 

As well as web analytics and delivery data from ad platforms, the following are suggestions of other sources of information that could capture sustainability attitudes and intent to augment your centralised reporting and ongoing strategy: 

• Social listening: Platforms exist that aggregate the results and interactions with organic and paid posts across multiple networks. Visualising engagement metrics and keywords from comments over time gives a direct and live insight into your customers’ and potential customers’ opinions and areas of concern. 

• CRM: Can you identify your most sustainable products or customers in your CRM and segment your data accordingly? As well as being visualised, these could also be profiled to give socio-demographic segmentation and geographic mapping. 

• Call tracking: How do your sales advisors or customer service team handle queries, or actively promote, the sustainable credentials of your product? Are there successes in certain locations that can be shared with the wider business? Automating much of this analysis through conversation analytics and a firm framework for measuring call quality and outcomes can all be achieved with the right tracking support.  

Why now? 

Businesses aligning their long-term strategies with sustainability targets has been a firm fixture in the news since COP26. Alongside this increased conversation, we’re also in the midst of accelerated post-pandemic digital transformation: In 2020, McKinsey put global share of products and service offerings partially or fully digitised seven years ahead of the average annual increase from the previous three years.  

Given that seemingly holistic sales and marketing performance reports still tend to be dominated by web analytics, Google’s latest version of web analytics, GA4, has also been a topical catalyst for businesses rethinking their wider measurement and reporting strategies. Its enhanced event tracking lends itself well to improved understanding of user engagement, with web and app features and content and there’s an encouragement for integrating and joining with other data sources for wider business intelligence. Read more on our latest thinking on the future of analytics here. 

Considered objectively, this a pivotal moment in the ongoing development of management information, and one with a huge degree of fortuity at play. We are at a point where a whole new set of concerns are coming to the forefront of social and commercial enterprise, and consequently metrics around these concerns are beginning to matter to businesses to a far greater extent than ever before. Happily though, with the native connectors within GA4, the decreasing price of data storage and countless other technological advancements, we’re also at a point where the facility to measure and understand this broader range of metrics and to derive worthwhile, actionable insight from them is cheaper, more possible and more developed than ever before.