The data that plays together stays together.

Let’s start with the obvious. Digital marketing has changed a lot in the last ten years. And the poster child for all that change is the ever-expanding list of channels that customers use to interact with your brand. What used to be just web, CRM, and maybe a call center or brick and mortar now includes everything from mobile phones and the Internet of Things to TV, voice assistants, and connected cars. And the list grows every day.

While you can cobble together disparate solutions to measure these channels individually, this siloed approach isn’t that helpful when you're trying to understand the customer journey holistically. The goal of channel and marketing analytics is to take the data from all those channels, to bring it together to deliver meaningful, real-time customer insights.

But just capturing data from a bunch of different channels isn’t enough, even if you can integrate that data effectively. You need to be able to access and analyze that ever growing torrent of data quickly and efficiently. And you need to make sure the people throughout your company who need it can do the same.

In other words, it’s not about the channels you can measure. It’s about the journeys you can create.