With digital marketing flourishing in many sectors, businesses are reportedly raising their digital analytics and consultancy budgets to accommodate a wide variety of uses. Out of 1000 companies surveyed in a recent study, 61 percent said they have or are currently increasing their analytics technology budget.
This number has increased from 35 percent in 2013.
What’s interesting to note is that 61 percent of those who are increasing their budget plan on utilizing that increase toward technology only. Only 46 percent said they would use the budget to increase their internal staff. However, despite the latter number being lower, it is still an increase from 2013. Last year, only 36 percent of those surveyed said they would use the budget to increase internal staff.
Because this gap still exists in budget expenses, the report states that there is a definite analytic skills gap and that staff must adapt rapidly to be able to keep up with growing technology changes. Out of those companies surveyed, here’s where they said the biggest skills gap lie:
Andrew Hood, managing director of Lynchpin, the analytic consultants who helped perform the survey, had this to say about the budget divide:
“Without getting into a correlation versus causation debate, there are definitely some positive trends emerging in terms of increasing investment and increasing success in making practical usage of data to make decisions.
However, as we saw when web analytics tools first hit the market, the skills and resource gaps are getting more accentuated and there is a potentially dangerous expectation that technology investment will in itself drive success.”
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