Forrester predicts that overall digital display advertising dollars will undergo massive growth in the next few years, from an estimated $20 billion in 2015 to $38 billion by 2019.
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"Publishers who successfully grab their share of these growing budgets will have done so because they were armed with critical insights derived from the aggregation, analysis and deployment of data from a wealth of sources coupled with differentiated speed to market," Forrester Consulting writes in the report.
Forrester was commissioned to write the report, Real-Time Data Analytics: Empowering Publishers to Make Better, Faster Decisions, by marketing automation software company PubMatic. Forrester Consulting conducted an online survey of 110 publishers and media organizations (60 in the U.S. and 50 in the U.K.) to evaluate their use of real-time data in analytics tools.
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Forrester Consulting found that 67 percent of publishers, regardless of size, believe that real-time data is important to their efforts (and 62 percent said real-time data leads to an increase in revenue). But only 27 percent of respondents said they receive data in real-time.
Forrester reached four key conclusions:
"The opportunity for growth is tremendous, but optimizing ad inventory, connecting consumers with relevant content and growing revenue is increasingly difficult as the market becomes more crowded with a multitude of data sources," Kirk McDonald, president of PubMatic, said in a statement today. "Leveraging tools that provide comprehensive analytics and an intuitive, singular platform will enable publishers to get ahead of real-time."