Marketing Analytics: How Your Data Can Boost Your ROI
Marketing – how do you know what its true return on investment is? You carry out some activities and hope it has an impact, but how can you be sure it’s paying off?
Analytics.
Knowing what the data says will help you determine whether you’re doing the right thing. It gives you the information you need to decide what to focus your attention and budget on – and what isn’t worth continuing.
And when our most recent white paper found that only 50% of firms analyse the performance of their marketing efforts and only 23% use data to understand their clients, it shows that there is some way to go.
Analytics and metrics
Analytics is the analysis of data to identify trends and patterns. Your metrics are what you’ll assess to gauge whether you’re performing well. You can use them to create KPIs.
For example, your metric might be views of a certain page. You could then create a KPI of 30 views a month. That’s when you start analysing your data to see whether you’ve achieved this target. If not, you can look into the reasons why.
Was the page difficult for your visitors to find? Did you neglect to post it on your social media channels? Were there other reasons it didn’t get the visitors you wanted? Your data will show you the possible causes for your missed KPI, helping you address the problem and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Analyse the right data
It’s important to analyse the right data. Vanity metrics, such as impressions and likes, may help you look good, but won’t tell you anything about your firm’s success. They don’t provide you with a huge amount of valuable data that you can take forward into your strategy.
If you’re hosting a webinar, for example, you won’t gain a huge amount of actionable knowledge from looking at the numbers who have been invited or who have registered. It’s attendees that matter. If you had 500 people register, but only 10 attended, this will likely be considered a missed opportunity rather than a success.
Analytics can help you find out why this happened. Look at your data. Were the registered email addresses legitimate or potentially supplied by bots? Were the actual attendees all informed of the webinar by the same channel? Look for patterns and common threads. This will let you work out why you’re seeing your results.
What to track
What you should be tracking will depend on what you want to achieve. There is no defined set of metrics you should be monitoring – each firm and each campaign is different. Consider the aim of the campaign or project you’re running and which metrics will best reflect success rates.
There will be some things that will be useful to keep track of across most activities, however. For example, you’ll need to know how many people are visiting your website as a result of your activity. You’ll want to know what the conversion rate is and you’ll want to know which pages your top conversions happen on.
You’ll then know which pages are your most commercially significant. This will help inform your future campaigns by letting you identify which pages to focus on. This can ultimately boost the return on your marketing investment.
What to avoid
- Setting and forgetting analytics
You’ve set your analytics tool up and it’s started to collect the data you need. The annoying part is that it’ll take some time for that data to provide any insights. In the meantime, you’re distracted by other projects and you forget about it. Doing so means you’ll miss out on important information that could change your strategy. So remember to check all your monitoring tools regularly.
- Keeping analytics siloed
Analysing your data shouldn’t just be down to one person. To really benefit, let anyone with a stake in the marketing activity have access. They can use their own perspective and knowledge to interpret the data. It could give you insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
- Not understanding the value
If you’re not putting a real focus on analytics, you’ll struggle to work out what marketing activity is providing your firm with the most value. Looking at the right data will help you make more informed predictions about future activity, letting you focus on what really benefits your firm’s bottom line.
