Marketing analytics is the collection and study of data from various online marketing campaigns and platforms.The objective of marketing analytics is to assess the efficacy and performance of your marketing tactics so that informed business decisions can be made about the future direction of a particular strategy.In the earlier days of marketing, advertisements ran in newspapers and on radio channels, but there was no way to understand if the ads were working. We weren’t able to assess if the right audience saw an ad and how many people bought a product or service after seeing it. It was a ‘pay and hope it works’ method.Today, businesses can understand what device a person uses to search for their products or services (laptop, cellphone, or tablet) and where or how they found them. They also understand what type of content or media works best for their target audience.
1. Prioritize your audienceWhether your marketing is using an inbound or outbound approach, not knowing who you are targeting or where they are in the world hinders even the most well-meaning efforts. You could end up spending large sums of marketing capital only to miss out on sales and leads.Understanding who you are trying to attract is pivotal when it comes to business growth. With correct data and analysis, you can prioritize your target audience because you know their location, online search preferences, and what they require to make a buying decision.2. Compare marketing dataDo you know how your Facebook ads stack up to your pay-per-click (PPC) ads? Is SEO bringing in more sales and leads? Are your marketing efforts meeting business expectations and objectives?Marketing analytics answers all these questions so that you can assess where you should invest more time, money, and effort to further your business growth.Ultimately, you don’t want to be spending large portions of the marketing budget in areas that don’t yield results. It would be a waste. Comparing data will allow you to invest where it is needed most based on business goals and KPIs.3. Drive investment into marketing effortsOne of the biggest frustrations when it comes to marketing is budget. Where do we assign the majority of the marketing spend? How do we see a return on our investment? Can we have more money, please?Presenting this data and validating the effort that has gone into each marketing tactic will allow marketers to get more funds and justify the budget allocation. Data and analysis can inform stakeholders on performance and tweak and fine-tune the best ways to allocate budget according to what will deliver the best results.4. Stay focused on your goalsWhen you assemble a marketing strategy, you must base this strategy on key business objectives and goals. The data you collect keeps you focused on these objectives — giving you the latitude to change or shift focus if you are not on track to meet these objectives.Without data and marketing analytics, we would be flying blind, unable to show the results from our efforts, or understand what platform works best for us, or how to get sales and leads. We would also be unable to validate our strategies to gain more budget.
If we are looking to measure growth brand awareness, we would look at different data sets and interpret them differently from measuring conversions. To measure brand awareness, we would look at growth in a traffic channel called direct (more users typing in the website URL in a browser) as well as the growth in traffic from brand-related search terms in organic traffic.As an example, imagine you are a company that just went through a big rebrand — new name, new look, new website, the works. How could you measure the success of the rebrand using analytical data? One way is to look at the growth of direct traffic to the website as well as the number of brand-related searches in web browsers for the company’s new brand name. To measure this, you would use two marketing analytics tools — Google Search Console and Google Analytics — to see how many people recently searched for the new brand name. If these searches are increasing, you can conclude that brand awareness efforts have proved successful.Let’s unpack some examples of the models used to collect and analyze marketing data.Media Mix ModelsWith Media Mix Models (MMM), data collected from analytics tools is analyzed to assess the impact of marketing efforts on the bottom line. The question we are looking to answer is, how are our efforts contributing to leads or sales? The goal of MMM is to create an ideal campaign that drives engagements and sales.With this model, companies can adjust marketing efforts on consumer trends, seasonality, and offline efforts. For this model, you must collect data over a long period of time to assess trends. Typically, this allows the measurement of year over year (YoY) growth.Multi-touch attributionAs technology has evolved, so has the number of touchpoints for accessing the internet. People no longer browse the internet on one device (now you have a laptop, a phone, and a tablet) or just one channel (you use Google as well as social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc). A person can use multiple touchpoints before they complete an action, such as making an online purchase or submitting an online form.Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) is focused on collecting data based on these touchpoints to assess where marketing efforts would be best spent. This helps ensure you don’t spend most of your money and efforts on platforms or campaigns not delivering a solid ROI.Unified marketing measurementAs the name suggests, Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM) combines both MTA and MMA to offer more comprehensive data insights. This model helps reduce blind spots when collecting data and gives you more qualified data to make better marketing decisions. For example, understanding how seasonality influences and impacts the various touchpoints will help businesses plan their marketing efforts more accurately.
1. Too much dataOften, companies and individuals will have too much data on their hands, resulting in the inability to process or take action. It’s referred to as analysis paralysis. Having data is great, but too much of it can cloud and hinder movement in any direction. Often, the vast quantities of data collected are actually irrelevant to objectives. Data should only be collected if it can be easily structured for analysis.2. Poor data qualityThe quality or accuracy of data is vital. If the information that is collected is inaccurate, the impacts are far-reaching. Budgets could be allocated to low performing accounts or taken away from campaigns that are performing well.Decisions are only as good as the quality of data and insights provided. When data is collected, it needs to be:CurrentComprehensiveError-freeRelevant3. Unskilled data analysisTo make decisions or recommendations based on data, one needs to be able to analyze it. Without a trained person, the data could be misinterpreted, and again, wrong decisions are made.
Identifying weak channelsWhen you have your data broken down into channels or sources, you can see which channels perform poorly. This helps you make a decision about whether to allocate less resources to a channel or to change the content or information used.Adjusting strategiesWith data on your side, you can be smart about adjusting your strategy to cater to changes in trends, seasons, and patterns over time. Let’s take food bloggers as an example. Traditionally, food bloggers often receive the highest traffic numbers during fall and winter holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving. During summer, there aren’t as many big holidays that would garner as much traffic. To increase their traffic during the spring and summer, a food blogger may change the type of content or recipes they produce during that time to gain more traffic.Optimizing campaignsYou can also use data to improve campaign performance. There are often gaps or missed opportunities within a specific marketing activity that can be filled with the correct data to maximize the return or reach. Understanding your audienceThe most important aspect of marketing is understanding your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Where are they based? These questions need to be answered to deliver messaging that appeals to them.Marketing analytics allows you to do just that. You can gain valuable insight into who your audience is, what their interests are, and their location.
Google tools for marketing analyticsGoogle analyticsGoogle Analytics (GA) is the most common tool used to measure traffic to a website, conversions, and a host of other data sets. GA is free to use and requires that you place a tracking code on your site.Metrics often tracked by GA include traffic by channel and device.Traffic is a broad metric that measures how many people visited your site or platform. It covers three general metrics, which we will cover below:Traffic by channelThis metric allows us to see how people come to visit our site. The questions answered with this metric are:Where did our visitors come from (organic search, Facebook, an ad campaign)?How many new visitors came from these channels?How many sessions did they have on the site?How many conversions (leads or sales) did each channel bring?Traffic by deviceAs we know, there are multiple touchpoints or ways to access a website, and this metric allows us to gain insight into the device used. The metric tracks visit by users via:DesktopMobileTabletData collected will allow you to plan and optimize based on the most used device. GA can also break down data according to the type of device used to access a website. Was the user on a Samsung device, or was it an iPhone?Google Analytics covers a wide range of data, which gives you valuable insight into understanding your audience and allows you to plan how best to go about optimizing your campaign.Google Search ConsoleGoogle Search Console (GSC) focuses on how your site performs from a search perspective. SEO specialists and webmasters use GSC to gain insight into how Google indexes the website (for the Google Search index) and where the site ranks for a target search term.The metrics we look for here from a broad basis are clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position.ClicksThe clicks metric tells us how many users saw our search result snippet on a search results page and clicked on it. We can compare this to a set period of time to see if we are growing or not. ImpressionsImpressions tell us how many saw our search result snippet for a particular search in their web browser. Click-through rateClick-through rate (CTR) is calculated using the clicks and impressions metrics to determine how many saw a result snippet and then clicked on it to visit the site. We use this metric to understand how to improve the essential SEO elements on our web pages to get a better CTR. Average positionThe average position is where you rank on a search results page for a search query. Are you on the first results page for that query, or are you on page three or four? We call this metric “average position” because each website has a different set of results for the same search term. Why? Because of personalized search.GSC then takes where your site ranked and gets an average over the number of times it appeared in an online search.GSC is essential from an organic search perspective. Even though it focuses on one channel, the insights available can help you make informed decisions for alternative marketing campaigns. For example, if you are trying to get more sales around a specific search term, but can’t rank for it organically, perhaps it is wise to have a paid search campaign for that search term instead.
Tools by tacticEach marketing channel or service has tailored tools to measure the performances based on commonly used metrics within each field. In inbound marketing, there are tools specifically created to collect data based on the marketing tactic. These tactics would be SEO, paid advertising, or social media marketing.We have highlighted some of these tools based on the marketing tactic or channel below.SEO data collection tools SEO analytics measures how well your site performs in organic search. The goal is to answer how well you rank in search, how much organic traffic you get, and if that traffic converts.The most common SEO data tools are:SEMRushAhrefsMozUberSuggestGoogle TrendsSEO media data collection toolsBeing able to track how people engage with your social media pages or content is vital. How they found you is equally important. Are you reaching the right audience? This is a question you need to answer if you want to drive better engagement or increase your social media reach. The tools most commonly used for collecting social media data are:Facebook InsightsInstagram InsightsTwitter AnalyticsBuzzFeedHootsuiteUser-experience based toolsUser experience (UX) is the analysis of how a user interacts with a website. What are the points that disrupt their user journey or cause the experience to be a negative one? With UX-based tools, we use heat maps, click maps, and funnels to understand a platform’s experiences.The most common tools used for UX data analysis are:HotJarCrazyEggMixpanel
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