Paid, and organic marketing efforts share the same overarching goals: raise brand awareness, drive thought leadership, and generate qualified leads. These broad objectives can be subdivided into specific, trackable metrics that marketing teams can use to define success and gauge performance. If you're not a marketer or have never worked using marketing analytics, you might wonder how progress is tracked, where marketing data comes from, and why it's crucial to analyze it. Marketing analytics can help in this situation.
What is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics measures, manages, and analyzes marketing performance to maximize effectiveness and ROI (ROI). Understanding marketing analytics enables marketers to be more efficient at their jobs and save money on web marketing.
In addition to the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can provide profound insights into customer preferences and trends. Despite these compelling benefits, most organizations fail to realize the promises of marketing analytics due to the difficulties in measuring ROI. However, with the introduction of search engines, paid search marketing, search engine optimization, and powerful new WordStream software products, marketing analytics is more powerful and more accessible to implement than ever.
Importance of Marketing Analytics?
Analytics is more than just a nice-to-have feature. It's one of the best ways to understand your customer journey and determine what works and what doesn't in your campaigns. That information is critical for your future online marketing efforts. Here are a few examples of the importance of marketing analytics data:
1. Quantify Your Assertions
Numbers can persuade. You could tell your CFO that content attracts customers or that 72 percent of marketers believe that content increases customer engagement. The second option is more likely to result in funding. When you include relevant statistics, people are more likely to care about your claims. You can only think in broad strokes without specific marketing data points, such as your ROI before and after a campaign. Either your income increased or decreased while a particular ad was running. Either you got more email list sign-ups after you started PPC advertising, or you didn't.
Analytics allows you to take that data and determine its marketing impact and how much a specific campaign actually brought in. How many of the 100 email opt-ins you received on the first day of your PPC campaign came from the ad itself? Obtaining funding is much easier if you can determine whether or not the marketing initiative itself was successful. And if it doesn't work, you can save money that would have been spent on continuing the initiative. With marketing analytics, you can clearly demonstrate whether or not something is working and why. And with that "why," you can persuade others to make a change.
2. Transform Marketing Analytics Data into Information
Today, almost every business has access to customer data and web analytics tools. The differences are whether or not the companies use marketing analytics data. According to the Harvard Business Review, too often, it simply sits in a server without doing anything beneficial. It could be misconstrued and misapplied in the worst-case scenario, leading your marketing team astray. You must subject your data to relevant data analysis to become helpful information. For example, at the start of your PPC campaign, your monthly revenue is around $10,000. Your monthly receipts have increased to $15,000 after your first campaign. Should you reinvest in the same ad? It is conditional. Was there an increase in sales across the board that month? Perhaps your products became popular for unrelated reasons. Did you have any other advertisements running at the time? How many of your customers were brought in by that PPC ad? Data analytics provides answers to these questions. With these answers, you can make fact-based decisions in your marketing program rather than hunches.
3. Contrast and Compare Your Marketing Analytics Data
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Analytics allows you to take it a step further and compare the components of marketing analytics data sets to one another. As an example:
- How did your earnings from paid search, social media marketing, or organic search compare to your projections?
- Did there seem to be any differences in revenue generation across demographics?
- How did your PPC campaign's ROI compare to your Facebook ad campaign's ROI?
- How much revenue did your PPC campaign generate in first-time sales versus lifetime revenue? Your advertising campaigns, content initiatives, and customer groups are all linked. If you understand the intersections, you can eliminate irrelevant information and make the best decisions for your company's specific goals.
4. Maintain a Goal-oriented Mindset
Every piece of marketing you create has a purpose, whether it's to increase sales or simply drive more traffic to your company's website. The more you analyze and use marketing analytics data at your disposal, the more you will understand your progress toward your objectives. Marketing analytics allows you to track progress and identify potential problems if it isn't happening as quickly as you'd like. Assume you ran a Facebook ad campaign with an ROI of slightly less than 3:1. Your team advises you to try something else but examine the data. Your ad had a high click-through rate, but your homepage bounce rate was high. The issue was not with the PPC campaign. But you would never have known if it hadn't been for good analytics.
Using Marketing Analytics to Boost Company Growth
A collection of numbers is data. You benefit when you use marketing analytics data to direct your marketing efforts away from what doesn't work and toward what does.
1. Customer Data Should be Segmented
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You can get more specific (and valuable) data if you segment your customer data based on specific qualities or actions. You can segment based on any customer demographic factor that impacts your results. These are some examples:
- Age category
- Gender
- Education level
- Annual income
- Family status
- Geographic location
You can also segment marketing analytics data based on consumer behaviors, sorting by customers who:
- abandon their shopping carts
- browse your product pages without purchasing
- buy from you regularly
- haven't visited your website in a while
This segmentation allows you to filter your data based on relevance, removing what you don't need and keeping what you do. Consider a large group of customers who abandon their shopping carts. You run a series of tests to determine whether Facebook or email is the best way to entice them to return to their cart. You discover that email has a higher ROI if you include language that creates a sense of urgency. This information prevents you from pursuing cart abandoners in areas where they are not looking.
2. Make Certain That You have High-quality Data
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Great analytics can only be achieved with high-quality data. Data from five years ago will not be relevant to your marketing campaigns this year—and if the data has gaps, it may not be relevant at all.
To be considered high-quality marketing analytics data, it must be:
- Current
- Comprehensive, with no gaps
- Error-free
- As precise as required by the data analysis
- Relevant to the analysis
Marketing analytics should always be goal-oriented, so the final point is crucial. You can use old or incomplete data if you treat it carefully, but if the data isn't relevant to the needs of your campaign, leave it out.
3. Consider the Future
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It's no longer enough to know what happened in the past or even what's going on right now (although real-time analytics are essential). Predicting what will happen in the future is also vital for effective marketing. Fortunately, you don't need a crystal ball for this—predictive analytics can assist you in looking ahead. These tools use marketing analytics data and historical trends to predict your expected results under various conditions. Predictive analytics can assist you in answering questions such as:
- Would a more expensive search engine campaign produce better results?
- Would a search marketing campaign on one platform complement a campaign on another? Would an email campaign, for example, translate to Facebook ads? Would your Facebook ad be effective on Instagram?
- How much revenue can you expect from your social media marketing campaign in a new market? You don't have to get too complicated with your predictive analytics, but devoting some time to them can help you determine whether or not what you're doing is effective.
4. Examine Both the Good and the Bad
Focusing on your strengths feels good, but don't stop there. Paying attention to where your marketing efforts fall short can teach you just as much. Is there anything in your marketing analytics that can explain a sudden drop in sales? Examine where your content is falling short, but remember to stay positive and goal-oriented. Consider your shortfalls to be opportunities, and use your analytics tools to figure out how to close the gap. And, as you make changes, keep collecting and analyzing data so you can notice when things improve.
Introducing Strikingly
If you create a website in Strikingly, you'll have access to our fantastic analytics feature from the dashboard of your site. It is straightforward to use your Strikingly built-in analytics. The statistics show the number of site visitors, the country they are viewing from, and where they are coming from.
When you create an online store in Strikingly, you'll be able to see analytics from more data points, such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and sales for each product page. This information will assist you in keeping your inventory up to date with changing trends. It will also show you which parts of your sales funnel are yielding the best results. To supplement your data, you can connect your Strikingly website to Google Analytics and benefit from Strikingly analytics and Google Analytics. Create a website with Strikingly today, then use its analytics to create effective marketing campaigns to propel your company forward!
Conclusion
Marketing analytics will assist you in creating more effective campaigns for your company. You'll better understand how your marketing strategies work, allowing you to tweak them for better results. Marketing analytics measures marketing performance to improve marketing efforts' return on investment (ROI). With a better understanding of the goals, metrics, and best practices for marketing analytics, you should assist your marketing team in working more efficiently and effectively. Best wishes!
