Updated June 8, 2023

Introduction to Marketing Analytics For Dummies

Analytics is one of those words; using it correctly in business leads to great success. Most of us would have heard the word “analytics,” but we often relate it to web analytics tools like Google Analytics and others.

Web analytics gives you detailed knowledge about the technical performance of your site. Still, marketers need much more information to know the performance of their marketing campaign, which web analytics will not provide.

So what exactly makes marketing analytics different from web analytics?

Web analytics measures things the webmaster considers, whereas Marketing analytics measures business metrics like traffic, leads, and sales.
Web analytics includes data from your website, whereas Marketing analytics includes data from various sources like social media.
Web analytics produces reports which mainly focus on one factor – Page views, whereas Marketing analytics is usually people-centric.

Marketing Analytics lets the marketing people find out the true ROI of their marketing activities. They can also find out which marketing channel and mix needs to be improved to achieve their business goals. Sounds pretty good.

What is Marketing Analytics?

It is the measurement and optimization of the marketing activities to make the investment in marketing as effective as possible. It evaluates the success of marketing initiatives and overall marketing effectiveness. Simply, it tells you how your marketing Analytics programs are performing.

Marketing Analytics seems simple, but marketers need to spend hours together to achieve the desired outcome of their efforts.

Marketing Analytics gathers data from all the marketing channels and consolidates it into a general marketing view. This marketing view will help you know about the analytical results of your marketing campaigns. This view will also help you decide on further actions to make your marketing more effective.

It goes beyond the on-site indicators and depends on offsite metrics and offsite works. It considers all the things for measurement of your marketing success.

What can you do with Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics will help you improve the marketing performance on an individual and an overall channel basis. It will help you to answer a few marketing analytics questions, which are listed below.

How are your marketing initiatives performing today?
Are the marketing resources appropriately allocated?
Is the investment made to the right channel?
What should you do to improve them?
What marketing activities do your competitors follow?
Where do you need to invest more time and money?
What are the channels that you are not using for marketing?
Which channel returns the most feedback?
Which channel is limited by the resources?
What marketing strategies are experiencing stable growth?
What is the next step to take?
What should be prioritized for the investments?

Marketing analytics will help you do the following things:

Identify which topic to blog about.
Refine your SEO strategy.
Decide where to spend your time.
Determine the email frequency.
Decide what type of content to use.
Segment the email communications.
Improve your landing pages.
Focus on the channels that work best for your business.

Note: Become a Business Analytics Expert. Develop solutions to business problems effectively. Learn to define, analyze and document business requirements. Investigate business activities to make them more efficient.

What can Marketing Analytics do for you?

What if web analytics are not enough to meet your needs?

Marketing analytics will help you when web analytics fails to help you.

1. Integrate with different marketing channels

Marketing analytics will help you have direct control over all the marketing channels you use for marketing. You will be able to know the performance of each channel. It will help you to prepare the analytics report easily by combining the performance of all the marketing channels.

For example, if you have posted an ad to create leads, marketing analytics will help you know how many people clicked on your ads and how many visitors are converted into leads. You can also know the effectiveness of the ads concerning other marketing activities.

2. People-centric Data

As we already saw, the main difference between web analytics and marketing analytics is that web analytics focuses on page views, and marketing analytics focuses on the person. This marketing analytics feature will help you know about individual prospects and leads toward different marketing channels and initiatives. I will let you know.

From where an individual lead has come to your site?
Is the lead converted into sales?
Is the lead active on your site?
Are they subscribed to your emails and click on your emails?
Do they read your blog?

The questions to all these answers will provide you with valuable information to generate more leads through effective marketing campaigns. It will also help you understand the trends among the people, which marketing technique will work out the best, and at which stage. It will make it possible to work out effective lead management.

3. Closed Loop Data

The significant attraction of Marketing analytics is its ability to relate marketing activities to sales.

How do you know how many of your leads are being converted into customers and derive profit for your business?

Closed-loop marketing analytics will help you to know which marketing channel drives more sales and profit to your business. Marketing analytics can be joined with CRM platforms

Why is Marketing Analytics Important?

As the business expands into new categories, new technologies are introduced to improve the business. Developing better analytical tools has undoubtedly helped companies become leaders in their fields.

Due to the increasing customer expectations and advancement of technologies, marketers face a challenging environment.

Web analytics alone will not help marketers to face the challenge. Here comes the need for Marketing analytics.

Many marketers underestimate the power of marketing analytics. This is because of the lack of cohesion. The different marketing analytics platforms will let the marketers gain deeper insight into their marketing performance and help them make sound decisions. Great marketers will use it to adapt, improve and modify their marketing activities.

Your marketing activities should prove to your boss that it is good and make you feel it is worth all the time and money spent.

Today’s marketing goes beyond your website. Even if you spend hours together in web analytics tools, you will not have a comprehensive understanding of how your marketing activities are doing.

It helps marketers to make decisions after considering all the channels of marketing. Such decisions will be effective and efficient.

It helps you to see how all the marketing activities are carried out and will let you know where the investment has to be made to make the business move forward.

It returns more cost than what you invested in it. Most companies now use Marketing Analytics. It will lead to better lead nurturing and management and more profitability.

How to Get Started with Marketing Analytics?

It starts where every other thing starts in your business. Before starting with it, you should do basic research and follow these guidelines.

1. How is the performance of your marketing activities?

Here you need to pay attention to the current marketing efforts carried out for your business. Please find out how it is performing now. Web analytics focuses only on your site and gives you a narrow view, whereas it gives a wide-angle view. It provides you with onsite as well as offsite reports.

2. Use a balanced analytic technique

Always use an analytic technique that gives you a report about the past, helps you to analyze the present, and predict and decide about the future.

3. What is your competitor’s main focus? Where do they invest?

We should constantly perform competitive analysis to stay aware of market trends. You should observe their marketing pattern and determine their marketing activities. Where do they invest more time and resources? What channel is considered more important by them? Are they investing in content marketing?

This competitive research will help you know where you are. Based on this, you can make a plan for your marketing strategy and succeed in it.

4. Know your analytic capabilities

Organizations have different analytic capabilities based on their marketing goals. It’s essential to access your analytical capabilities to know where you are and how much gap should be filled to achieve your goals. Knowing this lets you plan and develop a strategy to reach your goals.

5. How does your marketing activity perform in the long term?

Tracking the success of your marketing effort is more important than knowing how far you have attained the goal. While tracking, many things are to be considered more critical. You should know about your short-term gains or losses as well as your long-term gains or losses.

It will focus on the overall performance of the marketing activities, providing details about the channels that worked out best for the long run and those that worked out best only for a short period. Based on this, you can make better decisions about where to invest more time and resources

6. Take action on your reports

Provides you with all the information related to your marketing activities. Unless you act against such information, your strategy has no real value.

Implement a constant process of testing and learning and react to what you learn. This will help you improve the overall marketing performance of your business.

Mistakes that Marketers do with Marketing Analytics

Here are some of the mistakes marketers make with analytics.

1. Set it and forget it attitude

After learning about this great term, many marketers start following it. They start collecting data but never get back to know what is happening and how things are going. It expects more interaction from the part of the marketers. To make it successful, you should frequently review the limits of the process based on your decisions.

2. It’s not a CMO’s job alone

Many people think that the marketing program is the sole responsibility of the CMO. But in reality, every marketer is responsible for marketing activities. They should actively get involved and plan what should be done next.

3. Failing to learn about the gains and losses

An organization should make marketing analytics a part of the team’s culture and share things regularly. You should inform the members about the gains and losses achieved through marketing analytics. Instead of talking about marketing analytics, tell them about specific campaigns that derived more leads to your business and content that worked out best for your marketing campaign and efforts.

Powerful Tools of Marketing Analytics

Below are some of the powerful tools described.

Measuring the effectiveness of your website – Web analytics come into the scene in this section.
Measuring the impact of your content marketing – This will help you to know what type of content is more attractive to the audience and how much it could contribute to the business.
Marketing ROI planning – Plan your reports. Marketing evolution is an example of where marketers can create ROI plans.
Predictive lead scoring and conversion rates – It is a predictive modeling tool. This helps the marketers assess and create content that will bring the business more revenue. A lattice engine is an example.

Conclusion

In today’s world, analytics is far ahead of traditional marketing activity. An essential factor for marketing these days. For so long, web analytics was dominating the analytics world. It is crucial for a successful marketing program but it does not mean it replaces web analytics. It also serves as the top measurement tool for evaluating marketing campaign effectiveness.

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