Marketing analytics and why they matter

In every aspect of digital marketing, measurement can be a challenge. How does one know which campaigns and efforts are creating opportunities and generating the most sales? Aside from remembering to provide attribution to campaigns, you must also take the time to revisit those touchpoints and review the valuable data offer through marketing analytics tools. Not only do these tools take the guesswork out of allocating your marketing budget but they also enable you to be more proactive with your future strategies, and here’s how!

What is marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics is an umbrella term that’s used to describe the processes and technologies that measure a company’s activities through various sources of marketing mediums. 

Marketing data includes some of the following:

• Web analytics: This includes elements like website visits, traffic patterns, referral sources, and bounce rates.
• Social media interactions: This includes elements like social engagements, follows, profile views, shares, and direct messaging (DMs).
• E-commerce purchases and transactions: This includes online sales, leads, and signups. 
• Paid ad campaign metrics: This includes ad views, clicks, click-through rates (CTR), cost per mille (CPM), cost per click (CPC), conversions, conversion rate, cost per lead (CPL), and overall performance. 
• Customer data: This includes elements like feedback, behaviour, and purchase history. 

Marketing analytics tools, software, and technologies are used to gather data and provide business owners and marketing professionals with content and visualizations that help them to better understand which tactics are working well and how to best optimize the budget. 

What are the three types of marketing analytics models?

Planning, managing, and optimizing marketing campaigns can be done using three models that assist in providing insight to better plan and allocate the budget. 

• Descriptive: Descriptive models use historical data from previous campaigns to display what happened, which provides hindsight into which future actions might work better for the businesses’ marketing strategy. 
• Predictive: Predictive models provide further insights than descriptive models, using past campaigns to predict customer behaviours. This approach is beneficial for providing more target marketing campaigns. 
• Prescriptive: Prescriptive models use data from various touchpoints by weighing the impact of each interactive for the purpose of influencing more efficient customer behaviour. This model is highly targeted and will often focus on current trends. 

Why do you need to care about marketing analytics?

Whether you’re a digital marketing professional who’s working alongside clients or a business professional who’s looking to better understand their industry, marketing analytics works to surface insights and influence customer interactions. 

Listed below are some of the many advantages of marketing analytics:

• It provides tangible data around paid marketing initiatives
• It informs how marketing campaigns over time and in real-time
• It connects marketing campaigns to traffic and other metrics that impact customer behaviours
• It influences future marketing and content strategies
• It helps you to better spend advertising dollars on effective marketing channels
• It provides valuable data on current and prospective customers

What marketing analytics tools are trending right now?

In a world where digital reach is vast, there are a variety of ways that marketers and business owners alike get the data that they need to plan, analyze, optimize and execute digital marketing campaigns—with access to so many free and budget-friendly marketing analytics tools!

• Web analytics: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and MixPanel
• Campaign analytics: Semrush, Cyfe, and Klipfolio
• Social analytics: Hootesuite and SproutSocial
• Social listening: Brandwatcg and Falcon.io.
• Customer journey analytics: Sprinklr, Thunderhead, and Pointillist 
• Sales intelligence tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, and ActiveCampaign
• Company financial data

And so much more, since most marketers and businesses utilize an abundance of tools and platforms in conjunction with one another. 

Do you need assistance in getting your marketing analytics in check? Trek Marketing believes that analytics hold the key to e-commerce success and we’re happy to teach you how to better understand them and/or utilize them ourselves to help your business thrive.

What is your current e-commerce goal? Drop it below for advice on which marketing analytics tools can be used to help you achieve your vision(s).