Maths can be a hard sell. Especially to marketers who, according to research, have relied more on their instincts and institutional precedent than data and algorithms. That lack of quantitative input in research has led to an annual loss of £2.5 billion.

Analytics have become more important of late in marketing because of the digital boom. Campaigns are now integrated across numerous digital and physical channels making marketing analytics increasingly important to understanding a campaign’s effectiveness and efficiency.

“Unfortunately, most marketers remain raindancers when they could and should have evolved into meteorologists,” Glenn Granger, CEO of marketingQED, which undertook the survey, says.

Of 459 marketers polled, 75% had never used professionally sourced data and 37% did not use any analytical tools at all. Quantitative evaluation after campaigns also remains scarce. This paucity of data analysis before and after a campaign is completed has led to a colossal capital losses.

Granger says, “Marketers are missing tricks left, right and centre. They often use the wrong channels, allocate too much or too little money, on their campaigns, and have little accurate idea of what impact each choice has on the bottom line.”

Today, Nielson launched a real-time metrics ad-tracker to measure campaign 'resonance', perhaps making analytic data more readily available to marketers.