2022 Digital Governance Report
Results from ObservePoint’s 2022 Annual Study
Most Important Priority to Stay Competitive: Driving ROI with Validated, Trustworthy Data
It’s been a tumultuous couple of years with the rapid shift to virtual everything and headline-grabbing developments in tracking technology and privacy regulation enforcement. These experiences prompt the questions around how organizations are adjusting their priorities in an extremely dynamic, digital landscape.
Respondents indicated that, whether through more automation, better insights, or less friction through customer journeys, the number one priority is to Drive Return on Investment.
Participant Demographic Overview
- 70% analytics and marketing professionals
- 50% enterprise-level companies (2500+ employees and over $1B revenue)
- 83% U.S.-based respondents
- Top 5 industries represented: software, business services, retail, insurance, and manufacturing
State of the Industry
We asked questions regarding company performance in key areas, server-side migrations, and the deprecation of third-party cookies.
Company Performance in Key Areas
Most respondents indicated they were doing a good job at building up digital capabilities (53%) and exclusive content (47%), but they needed more automation to improve their marketing processes (41%) and generate insights more quickly through analysis (34%).
Server-side
58% were in some stage of considering or moving some of their MarTech server-side, but of those respondents, 33% were having to build out manual auditing processes to validate their analytics while 27% realize they’ll have to leave some tags client-side in a hybrid model.
Cookies
As for the deprecation of third-party cookies, 29% are either not doing anything or waiting to see what Google does as opposed to moving to first-party data (24%), focusing on logged-in user states (17%), or testing new methods of anonymization and segmentation (20%). Organizations should be boarding this train while it’s still in the station.
Technology Governance
While improved decision making and data quality remained the strongest benefits of digital governance, we were pleased to note a few changes in the greatest challenges with regards to governance:
- “Lack of technology resources” decreased from 14% in 2021 to 8% this year
- “Inaccurate data” also dropped 4 percentage points to 6%
Digital governance does require time and human resources to accomplish, but survey respondents seem to at least be attempting to get the technology they need to validate and use their data.
Discover how ObservePoint's Technology Governance solution can help you understand what technologies are on your site and how they're implemented so you can ensure your data collection tools and processes are executing as planned.
Privacy Compliance
There was improvement from last year in terms of companies making privacy compliance a more typical part of business and assigning accountability to relevant departments.
However, there was no change in the number of people who have adopted automated tools to check for data privacy issues. 34% of respondents also didn’t know what the greatest challenge of data privacy technology might be.
ObservePoint's Privacy Compliance solution helps you with the most challenging parts of monitoring your privacy technology, running automated scans to make sure it‘s implemented correctly and highlighting any tags that your CMP might miss.
Campaign Performance
Spreadsheets are still king. Yes, we probably love them as much as you do for quickly keeping records and sharing them, but there is a better way!
Both spreadsheets and homegrown systems saw an increase compared to 2021, probably because enterprise-level companies can afford to make tools themselves.
More widespread adoption of third-party solutions will help reduce broken links, missing data, human errors, and hours spent managing tracking codes.
Discover how ObservePoint can help you audit your analytics technologies, protect your customer data, and ensure trusted insights.