Piano today announced the results of an original report, “The State of Audience Data and Analytics,” developed in partnership with Digiday Media to highlight how organizations are navigating analytics challenges and opportunities. A survey of 100 brand and publisher executives revealed that half of organizations lack the interoperable systems needed to collect, manage and analyze data on the full customer journey.

Audience data and analytics are the lifeblood of the advertising and publishing ecosystem, allowing organizations to deliver relevant content to the right audiences. Although more data is available to organizations than ever before, executives continue to face significant obstacles in analyzing these resources and taking action on relevant insights.

The report found that principal challenges for publishers and brands include:

• Silos in data management (56%),
• A lack of interoperable systems to collect, manage and analyze data and then apply it to the full customer journey (50%) and
• A lack of resources and roles to manage both the strategy and execution, including maintaining privacy compliance (48%).

Ongoing privacy legislation and third-party cookie deprecation are also challenging the ways organizations can identify users, pushing teams to find new standards for capturing data that prioritizes privacy and user consent.

To create relevant experiences for consumers, organizations are seeking audience analytics solutions integrated with comprehensive, end-to-end technology to ensure data flow, cleanliness and consistency. To improve reliability, respondents are taking steps such as streamlining data collection and organization (45%), segmenting data for analysis (43%) and setting data governance standards across departments (37%).

“Every executive wants to make effective decisions based on the data at their disposal. But this report paints a picture of the widespread challenges they face,” said Trevor Kaufman, CEO, Piano. “Legacy analytics providers simply aren’t meeting the needs of today’s advanced digital operations. And many organizations aren’t sure where to turn to improve the consistency and reliability of their data.”

To address data consistency and reliability issues, Piano recently launched Piano Analytics, a solution built from the ground up to address the challenge many users face with the overly complicated, yet limited, tools currently available. The platform builds a complete data-driven view of customers, coupled with superior customer service and responsiveness to drive sound executive decision-making.

In a future that prioritizes user preferences above all else, the organizations taking action to improve how data is used internally and, in turn, to create more engaging customer experiences, will be most successful

For more data and analytics insights, download the full report.