Marketing Analytics 101: How To Use Data To Improve Marketing Effectiveness
Marketing isn’t black and white. There isn’t one strategy that works for every brand, nor is there one plan that produces the exact same results for every industry. Marketing is an uncertain science that requires testing, review, and optimization to improve its effectiveness -- which is why marketing analytics are so important to review, interpret and use to make adjustments to your strategy, messaging, and tactics.
What Are Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics are sets of data produced during marketing initiatives and campaigns. The data shows the marketing effectiveness of one-time or on-going marketing endeavors. It helps you see which initiatives were successful and which factors contributed to or took away from the success of a campaign, effort, timeframe.
Marketing analytics often capture data as it relates to:
Website health and performance including search rank
Email marketing results
Organic social media
Lead generation
Customer behavior and activity
With the right marketing analytics, you can see which initiatives were a success, which were not, and what you can do to make future initiatives more effective.
How to Get The Most Out of Marketing Analytics
It’s not enough to simply track marketing analytics. You must have a strategy for tracking the most useful data and then analyzing that data to make informed decisions that will boost your marketing effectiveness.
As you create a marketing analytics plan, keep the following best practices in mind.
Plan your marketing analytics around your KPIs.
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are measurable data points tied to specific marketing objectives and goals. Before you dive into compiling marketing analytics, define your sales and marketing benchmarks. Identify overall company KPIs and outline the goals of your marketing efforts and listing the metrics related to those initiatives.
For example, if improving your search rankings is one of your primary goals, identify key KPIs such as volume and trend changes of organic traffic, number of site users, and benchmark current placement on search engine results pages (SERPs) for terms you want to rise in rank. Once you know your KPIs, you can ensure you have the right tools in place to collect the data and make informed, actionable marketing decisions to adjust your content marketing strategy or layer in paid search.
Regularly review your marketing analytics.
Don’t only review marketing analytics at the end of a one-time campaign or the end of the month. Make reviewing your analytics a part of your on-going process. Especially if you have active campaigns running that give you an opportunity to make adjustments and tweaks in weekly or bi-weekly increments.
To make your marketing more effective, create processes so you consistently and regularly audit your metrics, create new benchmarks, and look at trending data over time - stressing trending data because comparisons give huge perspective. Monitor your metrics weekly or even daily to keep a pulse on what changes are taking place in realtime.
Use data to answer important marketing questions.
As you look at your marketing analytics, use the data to help you answer important questions about your marketing strategy, approach, and effectiveness. Ask questions such as:
Was this campaign a success or failure?
Which message, image, platform worked best among all placements?
Was this campaign worth the expense?
Did our landing pages convert?
What was the return on ad spend and return on overall investment?
Should we repeat this campaign?
What could we do better next time?
How does this compare to other campaigns?
How does this compare to industry averages?
Who responded best to the campaign?
What opportunities do we see to create new and improved campaigns, products, or services?
What does this tell us about our overall marketing strategy?
If your data doesn’t help you answer these questions, consider what data points would. Update your data platforms to show metrics that offer more useful information and tell a more complete story.
Recommended Reading: 5 Steps to Level Up Your Marketing Strategy
The Best Platforms for Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics can be tracked in a variety of platforms and some with presentations that make digesting data so much easier. Here are a few of our top platforms for collecting, monitoring, and analyzing data.
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is a centralized data visualization platform that connects to a variety of Google data sources to create one unified data dashboard. You can pull data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads, among other Google platforms as well as from over 290 third-party platforms to integrate and keep all of your marketing reporting in one aggregated link that updates dynamically for internal stakeholders.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the leading tool to produce data about your website traffic and engagement. Use Google Analytics to measure:
Users
Sessions
Pageviews
Bounce Rate
Content and keywords
Acquisition by source and medium
Location of users
Advertising campaign data (cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion)
Goals and conversions
By looking at these marketing analytics, you can answer questions such as: What pages need to be added/updated? What should we be writing about? What ad copy/keywords/call-to-actions need to be updated?
HubSpot
HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation software which also has capabilities for email, social media, and content marketing. We recommend HubSpot because it is a robust marketing analytics tool that can help you monitor and manage:
Number of contacts
Lifecycle stage and personas
Deals and sales contact reporting
Alignment of sales and marketing messaging and timing
Engagement across digital channels
Email communication performance (open rates and click-through-rate)
With this information, you can answer questions such as: Are our emails personal and effective throughout the lifecycle? Are we adding in personalization touches and content to keep customers engaged? Are we offering enough content, products, services, and customer support to meet customer needs? Are marketing messages seamless with sales messaging?
Recommended Reading: Email Marketing Benchmarks To Measure (and Improve) Your Success
SEMrush
SEMrush is our top recommendation for website SEO and SEM analytics. SEMrush produces reports that help you to understand how your website is performing in search and what improvements you can make to improve visibility on SERPS. It is useful for auditing your website as well as conducting research. It shares data related to:
Website performance and visibility
Competitor data and benchmarking
Technical SEO
Content and advertising opportunities
Recommended Reading: SEO & SEM - One, both or neither?
Sprout Social
If social media is a big part of your strategy, you may need a marketing analytics tool specifically for monitoring social metrics. Sprout Social is a powerful tool for pulling data across multiple platforms into one dashboard to easily track, monitor, and assess the results of your social campaigns. It manages social data such as:
Clicks
Comments
Shares
Best times to post
Most engaged accounts
Best hashtags
Content types that win
Improve Your Marketing Analytics to Improve Your Marketing Effectiveness
Marketing is an uncertain science. What works for some brands may not work for others. A campaign launched one month may not work the next. The only thing certain about marketing is that you must test, measure, review, and optimize if you want to make it more effective. Iterate, iterate, iterate. And, you can only do that with the right marketing analytics strategy in place.
If you currently don’t have a marketing analytics system that identifies, monitors, and assesses your marketing efforts, SpotOn is here to help put your data story together. We can help you identify KPIs and create tracking and reporting systems to aggregate and learn from your data to lead to more successful marketing efforts. Contact us today.