Never before in human history have we had access to such a wealth of data. While having that much information at your fingertips is a definite perk of living in the new tech era, the numbers on their own aren’t enough.
In the same way that football players can leverage the power of data to lead their teams to victory, your marketing team needs to know how to collect and analyze consumer data to improve how you market your goods and services. But, with infinite data points to track, it can be tricky to figure out where to start.
What types of data do you need to record? How should that data be measured?
What You’ll Learn:
- What is marketing analytics?
- Why it matters
- The benefits of marketing analytics
- Top metrics to monitor
Marketing Analytics Defined
In the simplest terms, marketing analytics is the process of overseeing and researching metrics data in order to evaluate the ROI of your business’ marketing initiatives, as well as the act of finding opportunities for improvement. It also includes the practices and technologies involved in helping marketers determine their effectiveness.
Marketing analytics enables you to collect data from across all of your marketing channels and consolidates them into a single marketing view.
It’s nearly impossible, however, to separate the analytics from the metrics, but it’s also important to explain the difference between the two. While marketing metrics represent the data points themselves, the analytics aspect involves tailoring that data to your brand, which gives users a comprehensive story of how those marketing efforts work together to drive your bottom line.
Why Marketing Analytics Matter
Over the years, as more and more businesses expand to new marketing categories, they begin to adopt new technologies to support them. And since each new technology was likely deployed at different points in time, the result was a mishmash of disjointed data environments.
As a result, there’s a pattern of marketers making major decisions based solely on data they gather from individual channels without taking into account the bigger marketing picture. Social media data on its own is inadequate. Email campaign analytics data alone is inadequate. And tools that take snapshots within a certain frame for a single channel are extremely inadequate.
Marketing analytics, by contrast, gauges all marketing programs across all channels over a certain time span, which is critical for effective and efficient program execution.
As analytics software becomes gradually more advanced, organizations need to be able to accurately measure these data points in order to make sound data-driven business decisions. With that being said, here are a few interesting marketing analytics statistics that you should keep in mind:
- 66 percent of marketers agree that data analytics is an important part of evaluating their marketing strategy.
- 26 percent of marketers believe that their existing marketing analytics tools work well together.
- More than half of marketers worldwide feel overwhelmed by the wave of incoming data.
- Roughly 76 percent of marketing leaders base their decisions on data analytics.
- Marketing analytics is the top investment for marketers, making up nearly 20 percent of their annual budgets.
- Although many organizations are starting to realize the value of marketing analytics, 37 percent of marketers claim that proving their value is one of their top three greatest challenges.
- 45 percent of the organizations surveyed say that their data scientists are performing more basic tasks like data visualization instead of data analysis.
- The marketing analytics industry is predicted to grow by 14 percent by 2022.
Benefits of Marketing Analytics
While today’s customers are often underestimated, they’re savvy. With marketing analytics, you can gain customer insights that enable you to deliver superior customer experiences tailored to their diverse needs and preferences. Specific advantages include:
- Interact with customers in real-time
- Understand past events and purchasing patterns
- Uncover areas of the buyer journey that could be refined or improved
- Measure the effectiveness of current marketing campaigns
- Boost customer retention rates
- Predict the future of consumer behavior
- Monitor trends and developments over time
- Turn raw data into actionable insights
Top Marketing Analytics to Measure
Strategically selecting which metrics to monitor will significantly streamline the analysis process, empowering you to be more proactive than reactive. Once you’ve collected your data, you need to learn how to use it. Let’s take a deep dive into some of the top methods for examining your metrics to ensure you’re dedicating the right marketing resources to the right places at the right times:
Sales Revenue
This KPI is at the top of the list for obvious reasons. With every business, you need to make sure that your sales are surpassing the expenses your marketing campaigns earn. This sales KPI measures how your sales revenue is performing over a period of time.
Conversion Rate
It’s no secret that more leads result in more sales. Although this metric looks at the outcome, it can give you clarity on how targeted your traffic is and whether your marketing endeavors are helping you achieve your business goals.
Social Media Reach
Are you attracting new customers from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram? Look at how well each social platform is working, and which one is adding the most value to your business. That way, you can optimize your budget and build a more structured approach to social media marketing.
Most Viewed Pages
This is an easy way to see your business from the perspective of your customer base and find out what appeals to them most without the guesswork. It also gives you a better understanding of the topics you should be focusing on.
Bounce Rate
Visitors may land on your website through different channels, whether it be a blog or social media post. Regardless of the point of entry, it’s your job to facilitate further interaction once they get there. Your bounce rate represents the percentage of people that left your website after browsing through only one page.
Frequency
While it’s useful to know the time lapses between a visit and a purchase, you need more information. Comparing which customers stop by once versus which customers consistently come back to your website each time you publish new content will help you identify the problem areas.
The Bottom Line
As the age-old management adage goes — “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
But be sure to measure what’s important.
When equipped with the proper tools and metrics, you’re able to discover the whos, whats, hows, whys, and wheres of your business, empowering you to not only meet but exceed customer expectations at every stage of the buying journey.
