So today when we think about a customer online, we know that they're travelling across different types of websites, across different devices, they're searching, they're on social tools, they're on your website - understanding these customers becomes very difficult in such a fragmented world.

Actually, Google did some very interesting research through looking at their audiences across various verticals and channels, and one of the things that they found was that things like display, social, even paid search clicks, are often assisting other channels in conversions, as well as driving conversions themselves. I would actually urge you to check out this research in your own time, because there is the ability to look at specific verticals and geo's, to find out what this looks like for your particular vertical. [You can find the research here.]

But in order to understand some of this, I think we need to take a step back a little bit and think about what is it that we're actually looking for. We need to redefine what you're trying to analyse in this kind of environment. We believe there are three main considerations when it comes to digital marketing. I suppose it's quite a broad topic - but to breakdown these three things:

Defining your actual audience - who is it that you're trying to target? This has become a very important question, and I'm going to go into some detail about how we can start to define these audiences using the data that you have as an advertiser. Once you've understood who, then you have to be able to target these users where they actually are - where are you going to target them? Is that across the web? Is it on social? What kind of ads are you going to use? What kind of message are you going to show?

And then finally, knowing who and where to target is great, but what you have to then do is make sure you can drive performance, so that means seeing the data, trying to understand the data and making smart decisions around optimisation.