What is Marketing Analytics?
What is Analytics? More important, what are Marketing Analytics?
Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance.
Marketing Analytics
The practice of measuring, managing, and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Understanding marketing analytics allows marketers and organisations to be more efficient in their programs and minimise wastage on web marketing dollars.
Why should any organisation care about Marketing Analytics?
Costs — Costs are increasing, margins are decreasing. This keeps the stakeholders up at night. What do you do if the costs are going up and the ROI is not justifiable?
ROI — How to effectively invest on the right software? Where to trim down costs? What’s giving me returns?
Competition — What’s your competition doing? How will you win their customers?
Benchmark — How will you know if you’re successful? How will you determine if you’re on the right track?
Strategy — What marketing and sales tools are we going to use and invest in the future?
What tools/platforms should I use?
A marketer juggles with multiple tools with a goal to acquire more customers. It all begins with “Spread The Word”. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
There are tons of tools out there and it’s always confusing that people tend to ask themselves, “How is this better than what we are using right now? Does this have all the features we need? If we don’t go for the new product, what am I going to lose?”
If you don’t make the right decision, you will regret at some point.
- Website — Google Analytics, Hubspot Analytics, Rakam.io
- Mobile Apps — Mixpanel, amplitude, Snowplow, Rakam.io
- Social Media — Facebook and Twitter Insights.
- Search — Google Search Console, SEM RUSH
- Paid — Google Adwords, Facebook Ads
Where should you focus?
- Website Reporting — Website traffic could be from mobile devices or desktop. You should always keep a track of the progress. Where is your traffic coming from? Is it coming from the right set of audience? Compare Desktop vs Mobile traffic.
- Location — Which part of the world is the traffic coming from? Does your company has an office there? Do you serve that location? Identify the top performing locations and also look for changes in the traffic volume. Say you own a local business in California and your website traffic is amazing with around 60% of traffic from India. The reporting looks great with a high growth in numbers. But these numbers won’t add any business value, as your California-based local business do not serve Indian customers. Ensure the traffic is coming from the right places, from the right set of target audience. Else, the numbers will look great and the value will be nothing.
- Mobile Vs Desktop: It’s all mobile now. According to TechCrunch and StatCounter, mobile internet exceeds desktop. Take a look at your website’s year-on-year growth of mobile vs desktop experience. If your mobile traffic is significantly less compared to desktop, then it’s only because you might not be having a mobile-friendly website and you need to fix it before it’s too late. Now let’s talk about Bounce rate. Bounce is when a user visits your website, lands on one page and then leaves. If your bounce rate on mobile is higher than bounce rate on desktop, it tells that you have a bad mobile experience. If it’s the other way, then it tells that your website has a great mobile presence.
- Acquisition — Customer acquisition could be through various channels, such as organic search, Referral, Direct, Paid Search, Social Media, and the like. Analyse these scores against your previous Qtr or year and you will find the growth rate. This benefits in two ways. 1) It will help you understand your ROI across different channels. 2) it helps you with clarity as to where you need to improve.
Few Tips for Marketers:
- Review source of traffic and historic trends.
- Compare traffic vs overall marketing spend.
- Compare Bounce and exit rates across different sources.
- Loot at Bounce and exit rates for Mobile vs Desktop.
- Look for peaks in traffic
- Isolate the day of the spike and examine the source of traffic. Match them to Sales and Marketing activities.
Why Analytics is important?
Data = Analytics. Period. Analytics is one of the important ingredients to determine the decision making process in any company. Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer profound insights into customer preferences and trends. The key is to practise analytics to support all decision making by providing the relevant facts that will allow you to make a better decision. Any data you collect must be measured and analysed. This will help in feeding the user with the right information, which can then be converted into an actionable insight over a period of time.
One of the biggest digital advertising mistakes is taking people to a page you can’t convert from. For instance, Homepage, Servicepage, Long forms with “required” fields.
Suggestion: Think about the action you want users to take and make it simple.
I’m sure there are questions around how rakam.io is different from any other analytics solutions. Here’s a simple comparison:
It’s easy to see rakam in action with our pre-built analytics solutions. Just signup and you are good to go.
