Marketing analytics is more than a nice extra of your marketing efforts; they are the A to Z of your marketing strategy as they help you identify the campaigns that bring results. But what exactly are marketing analytics, and how can you leverage them? We’ll cover all you need to know in this post.
What is marketing analytics?
Marketing analytics is the use of consumer insights to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and achieve better ROI. Statistics, predictive modelling, and AI are all used to uncover insights and answer questions.
Analytics are essential to marketers in order to understand consumers’ intent, the level of brand awareness and what drives conversions. They are also of value to consumers as the data provided can be used to serve personalised ads that address their specific needs rather than general ads that can be annoying.
At its core, marketing analytics serve two main purposes:
- Determine the efficacy of your marketing efforts by measuring the performance of your activities.
- Determine what you can change to improve performance across your marketing platforms.
The importance of marketing analytics
Analytics help you confidently make high-impact decisions in relation to campaign creation, audience targeting, and budgeting. As consumers have become highly selective, if you want to catch their attention, you need to have access to and be able to translate accurate data.
Through analytics, you can understand your buyers’ customer journey and create a personalised plan to effectively approach them at every stage by serving the right content , at the right time, on the right channel.
In general, marketing analytics help you:
- Understand your ideal buyers
- Gain insights from their activity and understand their behaviours
- Predict customer behaviour by studying patterns
- Prioritise your resources and adjust your campaign
- Improve the User Experience
- Drive conversions and gain an enhanced return on investment
- Plan your next marketing strategy
The 4 types of marketing analytics
Analytics can be sorted into four types, and you should choose where to focus based on what you’re measuring and what insight you are trying to gain.
Descriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics answer the question, “What happened?” in your campaigns as they give you long-term insights into past campaigns, lifetime value and ROI. In that way, you can assess what worked and what didn’t.
Diagnostic analytics
Diagnostic analytics answers the question, “Why did this happen?” and
helps you determine the causes of trends and correlations between variables.
Predictive analytics:
Predictive analytics answers the question, “What might happen in the future?”. This form of analytics tries to predict how a potential campaign might perform, what results a particular action might have, or how a specific cohort might behave.
Prescriptive analytics
Prescriptive analytics answer the question, “What should we do next?” to help you design a course of action based on possibilities. This type of analytics, although highly complex, can identify better, more profitable marketing approaches.
Where can you find marketing data?
So, let’s dive deeper into where you can find valuable data. There are three types of customer data:
- First party – data collected directly from users by you
- Second party – data shared by another organisation
- Third party – data collected, rented or sold by organisations that don’t have a connection to your company or users.
It is important to recognise that even though there are second and third-party sources of data, first-party data is more reliable since it comes directly from your customers and examines their behaviours, beliefs, and feelings. The following are some ways to collect first-party data.
Organic Content
To understand a user’s purchasing motivation, their stage in the marketing funnel, and what type of content they’re interested in, you can track and leverage their interactions with organic content, such as blog posts, emails, social media posts, podcasts, and more.
Paid Ads
Paid ads revolutionised the way we market to our customers. They gave us the ability to track engagement, evaluate performance, and adjust campaigns. By focusing on paid ads data, you can identify which content leads to conversions quicker than with organic content. Intern this can help improve your performance, ensuring a larger number of views and a larger number of conversions.
A/B Testing
A/B testing refers to an experimentation process wherein two or more versions of a variable (such as an email’s subject or a product description) are being tested. The data gathered show which of the two versions performed better, allowing you to learn more about the audience’s behaviour and how to attract more customers.
Surveys
Traditional surveys moved online are an excellent way to engage with your customers and ask about their experience with your brand, and find out how you can improve it.
How to gather and manage marketing data
In order to analyse marketing data, they must be aggregated and structured. Through the use of analytics tools, you can gather data, conduct analyses and pull out key insights with algorithms. Here are some popular platforms to manage your data:
- Google Analytics
- HubSpot
- Hootsuite
- Sprout Social
- Ahrefs
- Klaviyo
You may be wondering whether one tool fits all. For each platform you are using, you may need a different tool. Between free and paid tools, you can choose a mix that gives you valuable, actionable data and minimises your team’s efforts and time spent.
How digital marketing analytics affect every part of your business
Marketers use digital marketing analytics to determine the performance of their overall marketing plan, not just their website. Using digital marketing analytics, marketers can see how each of their marketing initiatives, i.e. social media vs blogging vs email marketing compares to one another, calculate the real ROI of their actions, and understand how effectively they’re meeting their business objectives.
The first step in creating a successful digital marketing analytics plan is to conduct a digital marketing study. This approach may be used to divide a corporate aim into three major kinds of outcomes:
- The connection between several marketing channels
- Data about the buyer’s journey that is centred on people
- Revenue attributable to specific marketing initiatives
How to start tracking
If you’re looking to enhance analytics capabilities, here are four steps to take at the outset of your program:
Step 1: Define what you want to measure
Marketing campaigns can be measured in many ways: conversion rates, leads captured, and brand recognition, for example. Defining the insight you want to gain to determine the best way to measure it.
Step 2: Establish a benchmark
What constitutes an effective campaign? This will influence the sorts of data and analytics you need to gather. For example, if the aim is to raise brand recognition, the success metric may be a higher proportion of brand loyalty indicated in a customer panel rather than an internet click or impression.
Step 4: Find the right analytics tool
As customers become pickier and databases expand in size, a marketing analytics tool will become increasingly important. As mentioned above, the right platform will give you comprehensive insights into performance in real time.
Step 5: Analyse and adjust your campaign
Tracking and analysing how your campaign performs is the only way to know whether your efforts paid off. It also gives you the opportunity to tweak your campaign and improve performance, and adjust your future marketing plan.
Step 6: Beware of data overload
It is easy to become consumed with recording every key performance indicator (KPI). This is risky ground to be in. Instead, we propose being laser-focused on a few key performance indicators (KPIs). Choose only a few KPIs that are closely related to the project goals.
How to start with marketing analytics
Luckily nowadays, you don’t need a crystal ball to look to the future. Marketing analytics will demystify your audience and determine your marketing strategy. The greatest starting point is to optimise your site’s SEO.
After that, configure Google Analytics and begin reading the reports. Examine the patterns that develop and the concerns that are posed. From there, you may incorporate additional tools or reports to assist in answering those questions and capitalising on patterns.
Turning data into growth
Marketing analytics are complex but essential to cementing your business and marketing goals and presenting results demonstrating proven marketing efficiencies.
At Digital Ethos, as experts in digital marketing, including data integration, google tag manager, and neuromarketing, we work with an extensive range of analytical tools and platforms. If you would like support with building and evaluating your campaigns, then reach out to us. We’re experts in marketing analytics, so we can support you in utilising these platforms to help you reach your goals!