What is marketing analytics?

Robust marketing analytics unlocks a better understanding of a business’s target market and customer base. Leverage marketing analytics to produce more targeted campaigns and improve the ROI of marketing spend across channels.

Marketing analytics enables marketers to gather, measure, and analyze the performance of various campaigns and marketing initiatives. Gathering and analyzing this data shows trends in consumer behavior, insights about competitors, and other data to solidify marketing efforts or pivot campaigns to improve consumer engagement.

This analysis and evaluation of data empower marketers to implement changes to drive sales upward while producing an improved return on investment. Data can be gathered across various marketing channels. There are many channels including social media, email marketing, and websites as well as more traditional channels such as commercials, billboards, and print advertisements. Gathering data from only one channel will not be sufficient. That’s why marketing analytics is important, allowing data to be analyzed across multiple channels which then, in turn, shows important information about consumer behavior.

Although marketing channels and campaigns vary from company to company, there is an analytics life cycle that many marketers loosely follow. The marketing analytics lifecycle shows how data is generated, collected, processed, used, and analyzed.

How do I use marketing analytics?

Although there is a general life cycle for marketing analytics, there is no universal process for conducting analysis. Companies should choose what is best for their markets as information can be gathered in various ways. Using attribution models helps to gather data based on what the marketers want to research.

Analytics attribution modeling is a type of strategy that helps marketers analyze touchpoints along the customer journey, from the first interaction with a product to buying the product and all the steps in between. There are multiple analytics attribution models to choose from and most models can be classified as a single touch or multi-touch model.

Why is marketing analytics important?

The importance of marketing analytics is growing alongside digital media and markets.

An example of marketing analytics in action.

Combining marketing data across channels.

Gathering data is key to successfully developing effective marketing campaigns, but the volume of data and data sources gathered across channels quickly becomes overwhelming.

It is important to know how to connect, transform, and analyze marketing data from all channels in order to draw the best conclusions. Without proper tools, data volume can become one of the biggest challenges for marketing professionals. Data scientists are experts in the field of analytics and are key to helping companies interpret data, however, not every company may have access to these experts. User-friendly business intelligence solutions make data consumption and analysis approachable to people of all skill sets and backgrounds.

Along with handling data volume, a good business intelligence tool also provides functionality to improve data quality. If marketers do not take the time and effort to implement a process to maintain data quality, time and money will be wasted and the best results will not be delivered.

Performing marketing analysis within a reporting solution brings improved results and functionality when gathering and analyzing data to improve marketing efforts. However, marketers need to be conscious of the importance of using the right models, the right people, and the right tools to effectively analyze all the marketing data they’ve gathered.

With the growth of digital platforms comes the growth of digital marketing. Now, more than ever marketing analytics can provide detailed data to improve marketing efforts and marketing campaigns. Properly gathered data will help marketers to understand consumer behavior, drive sales, increase return on investment, and solidify marketing efforts.

Overall, regardless of the size of a business, marketing analytics can provide invaluable data that will drive growth along with increased market share.