1.5 The Pros and Cons of Platform-Specific Analytical Tools
We should note that as we explore the most available and powerful analytical tools for digital marketing, we will most often be using both the dashboards and data provided by the same company that is selling us access to their audience. Google Analytics is a service from Google and Google AdWords. Facebook AdManager and Insights are tools made available by Facebook. It would be prudent to take a minute and review the pros and cons of using the analytical tools these and other platforms provide their marketing partners.
The Good
Google Analytics and Facebook Insights (along with all the other platform-specific tools) are perfect examples of how valuable their tools are to advertisers and marketers. They are the closest to the data we seek (they own the data), and they use that access to encourage us to use their platform in order to reach their audience. It is in their best interest to be honest and provide the most detailed audience and behavior data possible to allow their customers (marketers) to be successful. It would seem that the interests of marketers and platform owners are aligned here and that, generally, the platforms will share accurate, useful, and profitable information with marketers.
The Bad
As no single company has a complete monopoly on internet traffic, user intent, customer data, or a crystal ball showing the future of everything, the major technology companies are in fierce competition to “earn” more of each internet user’s time on screen so they can sell that attention and audience intent to the highest bidder. This mad dash for digital primacy has caused several questionable decisions in years past and most certainly is not over yet. For the record, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, Netflix, Amazon, Baidu, Disney, Verizon, and similar companies are all competing for your attention. They would like nothing more than to own your eyeballs for 24 hours a day. They don’t like to share. And they will each produce compelling data analytics to give away to marketers to try to do exactly that—keep you focused on their content and not their competition’s.
In 2015, Facebook allowed app developers and savvy marketers access to not only the user profile information of those that engaged with specific apps but also all of the “friends” of those using the app. This granted targeting and profiling data of millions of Facebook users to the companies that saw the available Facebook feature and exploited it. The story of how Cambridge Analytica used a perfectly legal tool that Facebook provided—a tool that seemed so outrageous once the public found out about it that Facebook was fined billions of dollars and changed their policy—is worth reading.
Of note, because the only place this analytical data was available was through Facebook’s own analytics tools (then called Facebook Analytics), this scandal went unseen and unstopped for years.
Is there a danger to relying solely on the in-house data analytics of each platform? Yes.