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Managing tools take up a lot of our time as marketers. We have to adopt them, optimize them and fix any problems they create during integration. I don’t believe it should be that way; we already run into enough obstacles as business owners.
Tools should make our lives easier. That’s where anomaly detection — one of the most underrated business tools of 2020 — comes into the picture. Let me tell you why.
Think of anomaly detection as threat or opportunity detection. It’s a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that analyzes a company’s performance and behavior to find data sets that deviate from the norm.
These range from lucrative pay-per-click (PPC) combinations to website security flaws that need addressing. It can help optimize an agency in the background while marketers tend to their strong points.
While 61% of marketers plan to use machine learning as a part of their data strategy, there are still businesses missing out. But it’s hard to blame them. AI and anomaly detection can sound very intimidating for businesses that have yet to use it. Let’s change that today.
Here are three benefits of anomaly detection and how to experience them yourself:
Discover Untapped Opportunities
As marketers, we’re constantly searching for more: better sales copy, conversion rates, SEO keywords — you name it. What if a majority of repeatable tactics could be done for you or your team? What more could each team member do with extra hours, especially when the mundane is removed from their day-to-day?
Anomaly detection is capable of discovering keywords, creatives and other elements of marketing campaigns that aren’t being taken advantage of. For instance, you may not be targeting certain search phrases, but they are generating organic traffic to your website. This allows you to further optimize for those keywords and related ones.
Prevent Security Breaches and Threats
Security and privacy are more important than ever. As technology advances, so do the potential problems they bring. That also means vulnerabilities and security flaws advance just as quickly.
While detecting anomalies is commonly deployed to discover lucrative opportunities, it also works in the opposite fashion, detecting threats and issues before they cause damage. Security anomalies range from rogue employees with too many user privileges to outdated integrations. Often, they fly under the radar and aren’t addressed until their effects are noticeable.
Take Accenture, for instance. Nearly 10% of its 25 million annual expense line processes were being flagged for non-compliance or fraud. While their rule-based system worked to an extent, Accenture implemented a deep-learning algorithm to optimize the process. It was used to reduce false positives, detect outliers and create an unsupervised solution.
You Don’t Have To Be a Tech Guru to Use It
Data sets, algorithms, machine learning. All of these things can seem so daunting. Nevertheless, that’s the beauty of technology. It’s capable of performing high-performance tasks out of our skill range.
Seeing as 85% of businesses agree AI will help them gain a competitive advantage, it’s becoming much more mainstream. And with growing interest, adoption is becoming a growing feature with anomaly tools. They are becoming plug-and-play, quickly integrating with campaigns and offering deep insights through intuitive dashboards.
How to Choose the Best Tool
Now that you understand the potential of anomaly detection, I’d like to show you how to use it. The first step is choosing a tool. I recommend taking the following factors into consideration:
• Pricing: Does the price of the solution match your budget?
• Demos: Do the tools you’ve found offer a demo? If so, try them to see if they are right for you.
• Features: Decide what features matter the most to your business and compare several tools against one another. For example, you may require financial anomalies over search engine anomalies.
• Integrations: Do the tools integrate with campaigns and other platforms you actively use? Ensure that you thoroughly read their documentation to find out.
• Reporting: How are anomalies reported? They should be easy to interpret and implement, which brings me to my next point.
What Integrations to Make
There are several areas where anomaly detection excels, the first being with marketing campaigns like SEO and PPC. That’s why I suggest connecting the tool to other platforms like Google Analytics, Google Ads and your website URL.
Secondly, I recommend integrating the chosen anomaly tool with website security and other similar assets. This will ensure it’s capable of alerting you of any breaches, unauthorized logins or malware in real time.
Lastly, anomaly detection thrives when connected with internal financial data or services like QuickBooks. This will help you properly allocate budgets, reduce spending and never forget about invoices.
How to Apply Findings
Congratulations! At this point, you’ve onboarded a new anomaly tool and integrated it with the platforms that mean the most to your business. Now what? It’s time to address anomalies once they are found.
The first step is to determine what level the anomaly is. Typically, they are graded between one and three, with one being minor and three being severe. Begin by tackling the more important anomalies, and hand off the findings to the right departments — SEO anomalies to marketing, ads to sales, budgets to finance, etc.
Conclusion
I know, I know. AI, and specifically anomaly detection, is not a simple concept for most of us to digest. Nonetheless, it’s extremely underrated as a modern business tool.
First, it’s capable of helping you find untapped opportunities, security flaws and vulnerabilities with less work.
Second, it’s the ideal relationship between humans and computers. There are certain things we both excel at —humans with their empathy and strategy and computers with their analysis and optimization.
Lastly, this technology is much simpler to implement and use than most would expect, thanks to instant integrations, clean dashboards and easy-to-read data. If you’re looking for a new business tool to add to your stack in 2020, anomaly detection is worth considering.
