Marketing analytics is a discipline that uses various technologies and processes to measure and improve marketing performance. Analytics finds patterns in your data and enables you to assess the success of your previous marketing campaigns. In other words, marketing analytics helps you to improve effectiveness in your marketing efforts.
Why should you Use Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics in practice means you first gather data and then you interpret them. During this process, you are using the help of statistics, machine learning, and predictive modeling to predict trends in marketing.
What will the data collected tell you?
With analytics you gain answers to questions like these:
- How well are your marketing activities performing?
- How are they performing compared to your competitors?
- Will your marketing activities be effective also in the long run?
- What to do to get better results?
- Which channel is worth investing the most in? (ads, social media, email marketing)
- Which channels are the most effective for your competitors?
- What activity should you prioritize?
- What will be your next move?
Why is Marketing Analytics Important?
Analytics help you to better understand marketing trends and to monitor them, tell you which of your campaigns were the most successful and why, and you can predict your results in future activities.
But there’s more than just that.
Analytics can also help you in other areas of your business:
- Marketing analytics builds credibility
- You can find out more about your customers and their preferences (what pages they visited, which products did they buy)
- Which parts of the buyer’s journey could be improved
- Which ads, media, and messages resonated best with your audience
- Analytics also save your resources
- Your company can grow faster with proper analytics in place
What are the Steps in Marketing Analytics?
There are a few stages in analytics:
Setting Goals and Planning
Every marketing campaign starts with setting a goal. Once a clear goal has been set, you can measure it efficiently. Thanks to analytics you can easily spot problems with your progress and resolve them according to your data.
Goals can be different for each organization. You can for example want to drive more traffic to your website, increase sales, conversion rates, or drive more leads to name a few.
Collecting Data and Gaining Insights from them
First, you need to review your past data.
All of the most successful companies collect data about their customers. In order to convert this data into a relevant source of information, you need to proceed with data analysis. There are many analytics tools available for this kind of analytics.
Optimizing
Marketing analytics will help you with optimizing too.
Analytics allow you to understand which content, channels, ads, and other marketing activities brought you the most customers or ROI. Thanks to that data you can invest in the activities that are working and stop those that aren’t.
When you allocate your resources to the best performing activities, your sales, ROI or other goals will get better outcomes which eventually leads to higher revenue.
Improved Analytics Reporting with CDP
One of the most widely used analytics tracking tools is Google Analytics. Google Analytics can provide you with data such as site traffic, page performance, visitors’ demographics, location, conversion rates, bounce rates, returning visitors, and other metrics.
CDPs offer enhanced analysis by integrating your own data into Google Analytics. Integration means that you provide your first-party data to the Analytics platform. When you share your first-party data you can merge all available data and remove duplicates (for example when someone visited your web from various devices). This way you’ll gain more precise insights.
You can also create better segmentation of your audience thanks to CPD integration.