Marketing Metrics and Analytics

Marketing analytics is your strategic roadmap to improve efficiency, predict returns, and prove marketing return on investment (ROI) across your entire business. But what are marketing analytics — and how do you get started with them? In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know.

What is marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics is the practice of managing and studying metrics data to determine the ROI of marketing efforts and identify opportunities for improvement. 

You may use marketing analytics to determine the success of:

• Calls-to-action (CTAs)
• Blog posts
• Channel performance
• Thought leadership pieces
• Website user experience

The more technology develops, the more time and budget chief marketing officers (CMOs) allocate to understanding the performance and growth influence of their marketing.

A recent survey predicted that spending in the area would increase by 200% in the next three years. Marketing teams often struggle to demonstrate credibility, but adopting strategic marketing analytics can make it easier to show ROI. 

How marketing analytics helps your business.

By tracking and reporting on business performance data, diagnostic metrics, and leading indicator metrics, marketers will be able to provide answers to the analytics questions that are most vital to their stakeholders.

Regardless of business size, marketing analytics can provide invaluable data that can help drive growth. At first, enterprise marketers may find the process too complicated. Similarly, small and mid-sized business (SMB) marketers might assume a company of their size won’t benefit from implementing metrics, but neither perception is true. 

So long as marketing analytics is carefully curated and properly implemented, the data collected can help a business of any size grow.

With proper marketing metrics and analytics in place, marketers can better: 

• Understand big-picture marketing trends
• Determine which programs worked and why
• Monitor trends over time
• Find the ROI of each program
• Forecast future results 

Many businesses are getting in on the act, even if they may have once been hesitant. Over 75% of marketers report how their campaigns add revenue to their business.

How organizations use marketing analytics.

When you retrieve offline or online marketing analytics, you can make important decisions on products, branding, campaigns, and more. 

Armed with your data, you can gain insights into:

• Trends and preferences. Analytics can help you meet your customers where they are. Use your data to see how well an advert has landed or fire out surveys on products and features.
• Media placement. Work out the success of your ad placements and branch into new media buying techniques. Analytics can help you see where customers click, engage and convert and where they switch off.
• Competitors. Use marketing analytics to assess the market landscape and close the gap in the competition. 
• User experience. Is your website placing unnecessary hurdles between customers and conversions? Analytics can help you spot snags in user experience and iron them out.
• Predictions. Armed with detailed data on your customers, products, and market, you can make your future marketing campaigns far more successful.

Components of marketing analytics.

Marketing analytics is a multifaceted practice to drive ROI and improve future efforts. It traditionally consists of:

Centralized marketing database.

Analytics requires highly detailed marketing data access, so you must begin tracking this information now — preferably in one place. Required information will include:

• Historical data on when marketing programs ran
• What their attributes were
• Which customers they reached
• How much they cost

Without this information, analytics is essentially worthless.

Time series analytics.

Unless your operational system stores historical data, you cannot measure or understand marketing trends. Frustratingly, many marketing and sales solutions are operational and do not store historical information.

If you want to analyze their metrics for prior time periods, you will need to manually take data snapshots from Excel spreadsheets. However, time series analytics can give you a full picture of performance trends over time, as the engine can analyze beyond point-in-time insight.

Advanced attribution capacity.

With marketing data in one place, you can understand what moves the needle and maximizes return on marketing investment. However, you will need technology that facilitates marketing attribution reporting.

Many solutions only offer basic attribution capacity: most commonly, first or last-touch attribution or multi-touch attribution, which are both limited by the type of channel or time horizon. This can hamper your ability to grow into the most illuminating attribution models down the line.

Be sure to understand the attribution limitations of any technology you consider before buying. 

Powerful and easy insights.

Very few marketers who want and need to consume analytics data are business analysts. For such an audience, user-friendly dashboards are required, allowing you to explore data trends and gain insight into their programs without wasting time learning the technology, building custom reports, etc.

Just make sure your marketing automation solution offers tools that are both powerful and simple to use.

Ad-hoc reporting and dashboards.

On the other hand, marketing analytics experts will need the ability to delve deeply into the data and customize their ad-hoc reports. In this case, table-like reports and charts are most effective and allow analysts to follow the scent of particular insights as far as they need to go.