Big Data helps Reveal Consumer Behavior

According to an August 2013 survey of senior marketers in the US conducted by Forbes Insights and Rocket Fuel, companies are seeing returns on their Big Data investments in a number of areas.

Among US agency and brand executives, 85% said Big Data had yielded more than half of marketing initiatives when it came to increasing insights into consumer behavior. Increasing sales, sign-ups and registrations, ROI, customer satisfaction and sales leads also saw similar numbers when seeing benefits from using Big Data.

Advertising agencies and marketers were largely aligned in determining the major benefits of Big Data initiatives. For agencies, 64% said Big Data allowed them to develop insight into customer experiences to help drive useful strategy, and 63% of marketers said the same. Agencies and marketers were also on the same page about the benefit of using Big Data to parse customer feedback and identify products that they wanted—52% of agencies and 50% of marketers saw this as a benefit.

The web is playing an ever-increasing role in collecting the raw information needed to fuel Big Data initiatives, according to a separate survey conducted by Forbes Insight and Turn in September 2013. Sixty-five percent of companies said they used the web to collect customer data, making it the most popular source for information. Call centers and in-person data gathering techniques were more popular than several other digital channels, however, including mobile devices and social media.

Courtesy of eMarketer