Learn about marketing analytics
Although you may have heard of marketing analytics before, you may be unsure exactly what the term means — especially if you’re not a marketer or have never engaged with marketing analytics.
This post will discuss the definition, importance, and logistics of marketing analytics. After you’re done reading it, you’ll be familiar with what marketing analytics is and have a solid understanding of how it works.
Marketing analytics defined
Marketing analytics is the study of data with the purpose of evaluating the performance of marketing activity. With the application of technology and analytical processes to marketing-related data, businesses can understand what drives consumer actions, better tailor their marketing campaigns, and optimize their return on investment.
The importance of marketing analytics
- Now that you know what marketing analytics is, let’s discover more about the importance of this process in the marketing and data analytics world. Some reasons marketing analytics is crucial when it comes to business operations include the following:
- Identifies what works and what doesn’t. Marketing analytics provides you with the necessary data to identify which areas of your marketing plan are doing well and which could be improved. This means that the data you obtain from marketing analytics will tell you the types of campaigns you’ll want to repeat and which types you’ll want to improve. Marketing analytics will also tell you the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts so you can justify future spending on campaigns.
- Calculates the ROI of your marketing efforts. Thanks to marketing analytics, you can calculate the monetary gain that results from specific marketing channels or campaigns. ROI calculations can help you determine which marketing efforts drive the most sales and prove the value of marketing projects.
- Improves the user experience. By collecting and analyzing your users’ first-party data, you’lll be able to learn more about how they feel about their interactions with your product and website. Having this qualitative and quantitative information can allow your organization to make changes that address their needs and increase the potential for leads to become customers.
How marketing analytics works
Marketing analytics usually has three primary functions — report on the past, analyze the present, and predict the future. In addition to this, each company will need to decide which marketing metrics are important to them before they start gathering data. Below is an overview of how marketing analytics works.
- Identify what you want to measure. Narrow and define exactly what you want to accomplish through your marketing strategy. After you set a goal for it, you can drill down into specific campaigns and marketing channels. Some metrics include ROI, conversion rate, traffic, and brand recognition.
- Use the necessary analytics tools and techniques. Your marketing team will need to collect, aggregate, and organize the data you will use to track progress toward the goals you defined previously. To get the most from your analytics, it’s a good idea to use a variety of techniques and tools to gather your data. Some ways you can gather data are:
- Surveys
- A/B test
- Paid advertisement interaction
- Organic content interaction
- Assess your analytics capabilities and fill in the gaps. Once you’ve chosen which data to collect, you’ll have to analyze it. Assess your current marketing strategy’s capabilities to determine where you are along the analytics spectrum. After you do this, you can start identifying where the gaps are and develop an improved strategy to fill them in. When using the right data analytics tools, you will see how you can bring together data from across platforms. This makes it easy to attribute your marketing success to specific initiatives later.
- Apply what you learn. Now that you have your data and have analyzed which marketing initiatives are working and which need improvement or change, you can start applying a plan to turn your weaknesses into strengths. When you take a holistic approach to marketing analytics, you will notice an improvement in your campaign’s success and in your customers’ overall experience. Act upon the data insights you collect and the solutions you develop, and you’ll see the improvement of areas in your business such as supply and demand planning, price optimization, and management.
Get started with marketing analytics
Now that you know more about marketing analytics and its importance in the business world, the process can bring clarity to your team about which parts of your marketing plan are working and which can be improved.
As mentioned above, when applying marketing analytics, it’s important to use a variety of tools when gathering and analyzing data. With Adobe Analytics, you can measure activity from mobile apps, mobile web, video, and even offline data.
By using the strengths and capabilities of Adobe Analytics, you can have the necessary customer intelligence to deliver the best experiences at the right time.
To learn more about what Adobe Analytics can do, request a demo or watch an overview video.
To learn more about marketing analytics, take a look at some of these additional resources from the Adobe Experience Cloud Blog.