Benefits of digital marketing analytics

Let's look at seven significant marketing analytics benefits to put it all into perspective.

1. An Integrated View of Your Marketing Data

Marketing departments typically manage a variety of initiatives across a variety of platforms and personnel. Bringing data from various sources into one location necessitates a high level of coordination.

A good marketing analytics package will identify all of your teams' various tools and platforms and centralize the data they create for analysis. Having all of your paid campaign data in one place allows you to see what's working, where you should spend more money, and how you can share learnings across teams and channels.

Consider this scenario: an image generates a lot of clicks on Facebook, but you don't receive the same number of clicks on your Twitter advertisements. You may now experiment with using that winning image on Twitter to see if it performs better. You may gradually add elements to your marketing mix to get a better view of what's going on and, more crucially, what's working.

The ability to combine and cross-analyze data from all of your initiatives is essential, and it will allow for more advanced analytics such as attribution and ROI. It's about gathering all of your information in one location, in the same format, and at the same level of freshness.

2. A More Bold Approach to Optimizing Campaigns

Raw data is useless on its own. Marketers gain value from data only when they use it to assess current performance, identify areas for improvement, and use these insights to optimize future campaign performance.

A/B testing, an important component of marketing analytics, enables marketers to compare contrasting approaches in real-time, such as running two drastically different ads (in terms of design and copy) for the same campaign. Even better, everything can be A/B tested, including messaging, creative elements, and retargeting strategies.

A/B testing entails becoming acquainted with the entire process of developing a hypothesis, defining the test parameters (channels, KPIs, duration), carrying out the plan, and relaying the results to your next effort. You'll begin by making small changes to one specific problem, such as changing the CTA on a low-converting ad.

You'll probably be more daring once you've mastered the process. Instead of just fine-tuning the details, you can A/B test large strategies. For example, which is more effective: selling directly to consumers (D2C) or selling through intermediaries (B2B2C)?

3. Additional Data Points for Your Awareness Analysis

Brand recognition is critical. How can you expect consumers to buy from you if they have never heard of your brand? And how will they find your name on Instagram, Google, and other platforms?

Measuring brand awareness has historically been difficult. Large-scale advertising campaigns may increase brand recognition, but they do not always translate into increased sales. Companies can use marketing analytics to conduct brand awareness research without relying solely on recent changes in the bottom line or Facebook likes. Social listening/tracking, search volume data, content reach, web traffic (particularly direct traffic), and share of voice analysis are all excellent starting points.

More data points can then be added to the awareness analysis. You could, for example, use social listening tools to collect all relevant online chatter, analyze search volume data and direct traffic, conduct surveys with your target customer base, set up Google alerts, and collect data from Google Search Console.

Learn more about how to perform sophisticated top-of-the-funnel analysis by visiting our resource page.

4. Improved Customer Segmentation of Existing Customers

Prospects are far from homogeneous in general. They each have their own background, preferences, and demographic profile, so you can't simply use a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy.

Profiling and segmentation enable you to group similar prospects together based on the criteria you consider most important. They allow you to develop targeted strategies that will resonate with the preferences of each individual segment. You will increase your marketing success and reduce wasted efforts if you speak to customers the way they want to be spoken to.

For example, if you own an outdoor sporting goods store, you could geographically target customers by showing surfboard ads to customers near the coast and ski ads to customers in mountainous, high-altitude areas.

You can keep analyzing your campaign data and fine-tuning your customer profiles as needed. Perhaps your surfboard advertisements fell flat with Pacific Northwest customers. When you take a step back, you realize that these customers live near both beaches and mountains and that in the winter, they're more likely to be looking for skis than surfboards.

5. Information that is pertinent to each stage of the customer journey

Individual customers take their own paths before and after purchasing your product. These journeys are likely to include multiple touchpoints across multiple channels. According to your marketing analytics, most customers use social media for brand awareness, search engines for consideration, and your website for purchases.

With these insights, you can provide relevant information to customers at each stage of their journey. Consider using less detailed but more aspirational content on your social media pages, for example. Knowing that consumers use search engines to learn more about your products, you could design your website around their most frequently asked questions and clearly lay out everything your product has to offer.

Your efforts could start with a tool like Google Analytics, which allows you to set goals, i.e., the steps a customer will take before purchasing from you (clicking on your promotional ad, booking a demo, etc.). After you've established your goals, you can start mapping out the sources that drove customers to complete each goal, allowing you to connect your customer journeys.

Google Analytics data will guide improvements to the customer journey, identifying areas where friction can be removed. If you notice that a large number of prospects click "Book a demo," but only a small percentage complete the corresponding form, investigate why. For example, are there too many form fields?

You can make the mapping even more sophisticated by continuing it after the sale. Consider how a customer interacts with content, as well as what it takes to upsell and cross-sell them. Then look for opportunities to automate and incorporate more product-led growth (PLG) into your business.

6. Attribution Modeling Shows Which Touchpoints Are Most Important

Customer journey research shows the steps your customers took before making a purchase, but it doesn't say which ones were the most significant (i.e., resulted in the highest ROI). Attribution modeling can help with this. It identifies which touchpoints a client encountered during their trip and offers a credit score to each one based on how influential it was. Marketers can then focus their resources on initiatives that have shown to be successful.

As you incorporate attribution modeling insights into your marketing plan, improving campaign ROI and freeing up more cash, you'll want to consider modifying your attribution model to ensure it's the best fit for your business model. The most common model is last-touch, in which all credit for a purchase is given to the last touchpoint before conversion — but there are many variations, such as time decay, initial touch, u-shaped, and more.

7. Insight into Acquisition Costs

Assume you have a firm grip on all of your marketing techniques, have observed how clients progress through the purchase process and have determined which channels and strategies are most effective. Now you must compile all of this data and determine how much it costs your organization to acquire each customer. Thankfully, dividing the amount you spend on a campaign by the number of consumers you obtained is all it takes.

A marketing analytics platform will track the results of all of your cross-channel efforts, allowing you to quickly determine which techniques, goods, and demographics have the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA). Increase your marketing ROI by investing more extensively in these areas in the future.

You'll also be able to compare your average CPA to industry norms and see how you stack up against your peers. Why are CPAs for different campaigns so diverse? Is it because of a poor strategy or because of segment-specific variations? Determine a target CPA for each of your tactics and segments, then A/B test multiple strategies until you achieve your objectives.