Marketing Analytics: Everything You Need To Know

Measure, Analyze, and Optimize Your Data

To drive a successful marketing strategy, you need to be equipped with the right set of measurement tools. Fortunately, with marketing analytics at your disposal, you can accurately gauge the success of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions. From types of metrics to suggested tools, this guide will provide you with everything you need to know to start implementing marketing analytics techniques into your strategy today. 

What Is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics allows you to evaluate the success of all your marketing efforts. Through the collection of data across all marketing channels into one consolidated platform or data environment, marketing analytics allows you to measure and analyze all your key metrics in one place. 

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Why Is Marketing Analytics Important?

Rather than basing your marketing initiatives on data from disjointed channels or assumptions, marketing analytics allows you to see the bigger picture from all marketing channels — thus allowing you to make sound decisions when evaluating your efforts. 

From the high-level view of marketing analytics, you can take a deep-dive into results that indicate how campaigns are performing. Marketing analytics has such a major impact on marketing agencies’ decision-making process that the market is expected to experience a compound annual growth rate of 15.2% through 2022

By successfully wielding marketing analytics, you can better understand your marketing and advertising performance and avoid problems that make inefficient use of your investment, such as ad fatigue.

Tip: Learn more about preventing ad fatigue and discover ways you can use marketing analytics to get more from your ad investment. 

Laptop screen showing various marketing analytics and metrics.

The Different Types of Marketing Analytics

Web Analytics

Web analytics is the collection of website data that demonstrates how users are interacting with your website. By analyzing this data, you can understand if your website is driving meaningful visitor engagement or if users are leaving your site without taking any action.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular and powerful free web analytics tools available; the tool gives marketers visibility into how users are finding and interacting with their website(s). Google Analytics groups website data into three main categories that correspond with the typical customer journey: Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions. Within these categories, marketers can view metrics like:

  • Pageviews
  • Page load times
  • Geographic locations of users
  • New versus returning users
  • Referral sources
  • Traffic by channel and device

Using web analytics tools like Google Analytics is a great way to evaluate website performance and better understand how customers are engaging with your web content. When used in combination with other digital analytics resources, however, the power of Google Analytics is multiplied.

Digital Marketing Analytics

Unlike web analytics alone, digital marketing analytics measures your marketing efforts and business initiatives more holistically. This collection of data — including data from your website and sources like email, social media, organic search, offline sales, and more — allows you to evaluate how your customers are behaving across all channels. 

Simply put, digital marketing analytics allows you to understand the effectiveness of your entire marketing strategy as opposed to the standalone performance of a single facet (i.e., website performance). This aggregated view illuminates the interconnectedness of your entire strategy, allowing you to understand how changes in one pillar can ripple through the rest. By analyzing this more comprehensive data set, you can visualize how different channels compare to one another, determine the ROI of each channel, and develop strategies to capitalize upon each channel’s performance and cross-channel influence. 

Hands sift through papers containing graphs and tables of marketing analytics.

What Are the Best Marketing Analytics Tools?

When selecting marketing analytics tools, it’s important to consider what your measurement goals are and what each tool can offer. Some platforms offer a full suite of marketing analytics tools while others center around one piece of marketing analytics. Make sure to choose a tool that includes the features you need for your business, and always consider what automation features and additional insights are right for you. 

Here are 7 of the best marketing analytics tools available:

Semrush

Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing platform that enables businesses to optimize their online presence across all key channels, including SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research. 

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is a popular all-in-one SEO software suite that contains tools designed to improve search engine visibility. Key features include Moz’s proprietary Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer, and Rank Tracker.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool with analytics features such as conversion funnel analysis, registration form analysis, feedback polls, and surveys, but it is known mainly as a heat mapping tool. 

Looker 

Looker is a business intelligence software and big-data analytics platform that helps you explore, analyze, and share real-time business analytics easily.

Mailchimp All-in-One Marketing Platform

Mailchimp’s All-in-One Marketing Platform provides AI-powered, user-friendly marketing analytics tools to send marketing emails and automated messages, create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, facilitate reporting and analytics, and sell online.

Insider

Insider is an integrated Growth Management Platform (GMP) that delivers a broad feature set across the sales funnel from acquisition to activation to retention and revenue. This tool leverages real-time predictive segmentation powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is an all-in-one inbound marketing engine that includes tools for email marketing, landing page creation, social media marketing, content management, reporting & analytics, search engine optimization (SEO), and more.

Tip: Discover even more marketing analytics tools you should be using in your digital marketing campaigns.

How to Get Started Using Marketing Analytics Today

Now that you know what marketing analytics is, the difference between web analytics and digital marketing analytics, and a few of the best marketing analytics tools available, it’s time to implement these tools into your practice. As you get started, consider leveraging these strategies to streamline how you measure, analyze, and make decisions based on your marketing data.

Check this out: You can visit our blog for even more digital analytics techniques.

Consolidate Your Reports

When using digital marketing analytics tools, one of the first things you should focus on is consolidating all your reports into one streamlined dashboard. Because there are so many performance and conversion metrics to keep track of across multiple channels, your consolidated dashboard is crucial for connecting all the dots and seeing the bigger picture of your marketing initiatives with minimal effort. 

With this wide lens of marketing data available, you can make data-driven decisions when optimizing your campaigns.

Plan Strategically 

Digital marketing analytics should always inform your digital campaigns. Prior to discussing your next strategy with your team, review your marketing analytics and data thoroughly. This practice will enable you to uncover new insights, leaving you better informed to prepare more strategic plans and efficient strategies. 

Is top-line growth your main KPI? Take a look at which marketing channels are driving the most revenue — it may be prudent to reallocate more marketing dollars into these channels. Is scale at a consistent ROI your aim? Use these tools to identify the high-ROI channels that can efficiently take on more budget, then fund them to their fullest. Don’t forget to look for patterns in top-performing creative messaging in each channel and use this to drive creative development going forward.

Segment Your Audience

Knowing who your customers are is key to driving successful marketing strategies. Using your digital marketing data, you can segment your audience into unique categories to deliver more tailored messages. These categories or subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Additionally, they can be based on purchases customers made in the past or psychographic traits like personality types, values, attitudes, and beliefs. For example, you could segment your audience based on the category of product they typically purchase and tailor your creative imagery and messaging to appeal to that known behavior.

Tip: To set your strategy up for success, make sure to follow these four audience segmentation steps to improve your marketing ROI. 

Experiment and Test

Digital marketing analytics allows insights to be pulled out of robust data sets. These insights can be especially valuable when it comes to experimenting and testing. New tactics or hypotheses can be validated without all the guesswork when analytics are used properly. 

For example, if a campaign performs extremely well on social platforms, some of its content may be repurposed for a different channel. The aim of the test would be to understand the comparative performance of this “experimental” content outside of the social ecosystem. Regardless of the results, you’d learn something important.  Either the content succeeds outside of social environments and should be used more broadly, or it underperforms, and you know that the messaging is best suited to the type of consumer you reach via social.  Similar tests can be replicated for ad imagery, landing page experience, optimization strategies, etc.

Research Keywords

When it comes to keyword research, digital marketing analytics ensures your keyword strategies are founded upon hard data. Using keyword research tools, you can obtain an inside look at key metrics that should inform your keyword builds — such as related search terms, average monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and more. These metrics can transform your keyword seed list (keywords that you believe people are searching to find your business or service) into a list of targeted terms. 

How To Perform Better Keyword Research 

When performing keyword research, it’s important to remember that SEO keyword research differs from PPC keyword research. 

For SEO keyword research, you should focus on understanding what keywords users are searching for based on their intent. These keywords will be used in static web pages, title tags, meta descriptions, and new content that fills keyword gaps. 

For PPC keyword research, you should focus on keywords you can bid on, or keywords that are going to provide the highest return on your cost-per-click investment. These keywords will be used in your campaigns, in your ad copy, and on your landing pages. 

Marketing Metrics You Need To Measure 

When establishing your digital marketing analytics dashboard, there are core metrics you should include to help showcase the ROI of your full-funnel initiatives at a glance. 

10 of the most important marketing metrics include:

  1. Traffic by source
  2. Unique monthly visitors
  3. Cost per lead (CPL)
  4. Cost per acquisition (CPA)
  5. Conversion rates by source and device
  6. Return on advertising spend (ROAS)
  7. Page performance
  8. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
  9. Average Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Position
  10. Branded search queries over time

Tip: Unsure of why these metrics matter? Learn their definitions and find out how marketing metrics play a role in proving digital ROI.

Execute Results-Driven Marketing Campaigns with Marketing Analytics

When it comes to robust marketing strategies, marketing analytics is key to developing results-driven campaigns. Without these comprehensive data sets in your marketing toolkit, your initiatives will lack direction and be fueled by assumptions — both of which could stunt your ROI.

Rather than leaving your marketing strategy’s success to chance, use digital marketing analytics tools to measure and prove exact campaign results. This approach will allow you to develop a consolidated dashboard that showcases all your key marketing metrics at a glance and make swift decisions based on real, proven insights. 

Still unsure of how to get started with marketing analytics? Reach out to our expert team today!

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