Marketing analytics should be part of every marketer’s daily routine. But can you imagine spending half a day every week manually extracting marketing data scattered across channels and putting it together into a spreadsheet? What a nightmare! Unfortunately, this is the reality for a lot of marketers. 

Is this the only way to go? Luckily, it’s not – you can automate your marketing analytics if you use the right software. 

In today’s piece, we’re going to answer the question “What is marketing analytics?”, share a few marketing analytics examples, and discuss how to pick the right tool.

Let’s start with a marketing analytics definition.

Marketing analytics is about using data analysis tools and techniques to measure, analyze, and manage marketing performance. The goal is to generate insights into how effective or ineffective your marketing strategies and actions are, discover the reasons behind these outcomes, and decide on the next steps. All so you can optimize your efforts and boost ROI. Marketing analytics cover a lot of data sources, from website analytics, social media, and email campaigns to offline marketing activities. 

Thanks to the use of machine learning and predictive analytics, it sifts through large data volumes quickly and identifies trends and patterns within the data to help you better understand human behavior. It can be of great support to your database marketing efforts. 

If you’re still asking yourself – “why is marketing analytics important”, let us shed some light on this. Relying solely on past experiences not backed by any data or gut feelings for marketing decisions is essentially guesswork. 

Marketing analytics allows you to eliminate it by giving you solid data – or evidence if you will, that lets you make decisions driven by data, not hunches. Without a marketing analytics solution in place, true marketing optimization is out of reach. This means you might not be allocating your resources correctly or getting the most out of your budget.

While the goal of using marketing analytics solutions is campaign optimization and the right budget allocation, marketing is a discipline that uses a lot of experimentation.

Measuring and comparing the results of many different campaigns, on different platforms, with different ads, at different times, allows marketers to understand what is working well for the business and what is not. You have to know it to shape the optimal strategy and tactical actions, as well as to allocate the budget to achieve the best results.

Let’s examine a few examples of what marketing analytics can reveal about performance.

Here are three marketing analytics examples that you can inspire yourself with while checking the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

Channel performance comparisons

While certain types of ads might work well on Google, others, like Meta ads might burn the budget. This can come down to several reasons – not only the messaging or creative format but also the customer segment you target across channels.

By using the right marketing analytics tools, you can compare the performance of a single campaign including its cost, ROI (Return on Investment), and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)  across multiple campaigns, channels, accounts, ads, and creatives. In essence, you gain a comprehensive, ‘helicopter-level’ view of all your online advertising spend in relation to your marketing spend from all platforms, channels, and accounts. 

Assessing lead generation performance across channels

When it comes to paid marketing channels, the term ‘conversion’ can mean different things. While it’s primarily used for sales, there are also other actions prospective clients can take before purchasing, for example, signing up for your newsletter. 

To assess the effectiveness of your marketing as a whole and across specific channels, you must also analyze lead generation along with attribution modeling. This means deciding how much each conversion, for instance, starting a free trial or signing up for a demo is worth sales-wise. 

Performance predictions based on historical data

Marketing analytics tools that use predictive analytics help you get a better understanding of user behavior and foresee which messaging or channels will best resonate with a specific customer segment. You’ll have a single source of truth that you can use to benchmark ongoing campaigns versus historical data.

For example, let’s assume you’re planning a marketing campaign for an upcoming event. By looking at the performance of previous campaigns for similar events, or the same event in past years, you can identify which channels (like social media, email, or PPC ads) were the most effective. 

You can then decide where to allocate your resources to get the highest ROI. If your historical data shows that social media channels drove the most conversions, then that’s the channel you should prioritize in your current campaign.  

Now that you know how to use marketing analytics, let’s take a quick look at a few marketing analytics techniques that might come in handy. 

Set up conversion goals 

What’s a conversion to you? To most marketers, it’s a sale or subscription – an event where a prospect becomes a customer. While this is a good starting point, it only scratches the surface. 

Sales cycles vary between companies. They depend on the type of product being sold and the industry. Some sales cycles are longer, while others are shorter. However, it hardly ever happens (if ever) that a prospect enters your site, browses for a few minutes and decides to buy your product. This might take place in B2C, where sales cycles are shorter due to product specificity, like price, shelf life, warranties, etc., and the fact that there is one decision-maker.

Before a prospect becomes a customer a lot can happen along the way – especially in the case of B2B. They might read your blog, sign up for a newsletter, review your product pages, sign up for a demo, and review your pricing. All of these steps can be treated as conversions if they contribute to closing a sale. 

Even though the point of sale is without a doubt an important conversion to measure, it shouldn’t be the only one. List your key conversion events, track them, and compare them against your company’s past performance. Doing so will help you spot areas that call for improvement. This will allow you to better understand the customer path and the touchpoints they interact with.

Make sure your data is integrated 

This is probably one of the most important things you can do to enhance your marketing performance, yet, many businesses fail to do so. Why is that? Probably because they view it as too complex. 

Often, marketing activities are dispersed across channels or platforms, all of which have their own tracking and analytics functionalities. The idea of consolidating all of this data might seem daunting, appearing to require advanced tech skills. 

However, this isn’t always the case. With the right marketing analytics software like ChannelPulse, you can skip all of the complexity. It allows you to analyze all your paid campaigns instantly, even those run on multiple platforms, presenting all your data in a clear and unified way. 

Overall, having a holistic view of all your marketing metrics, from web analytics to product usage, helps you better understand user behavior and guide your future business decisions. 

Analyze traffic from all marketing channels 

Make sure to track the performance of all your marketing channels (PPC, social media, email, etc.) and platforms (like LinkedIn, Facebook, X, etc.) focusing on both past and current performance as well as future forecasting whenever possible. This means staying up to date with the latest trends and developments in the digital landscape. 

Channels that used to drive significant traffic, like SEO might start to wane. This can happen primarily for two reasons:

1) due to algorithmic changes – after all Google updates their search algorithm 500-600 times a year so it might be hard to keep up. While most of the changes aren’t significant, it’s possible for some sites to lose over 40% of traffic overnight. 

2) due to technological advancements. We don’t have to look far for examples – just see how much disruption Generative AI like Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience) is causing in marketing. 

By keeping track of the changes you’ll be able to take preemptive measures and mitigate potential problems. 

Use one tool to analyze all your data 

Tracking and analyzing marketing data that is spread across multiple tools is both counterproductive and often ineffective. And the more multichannel campaigns you run, the more complex it gets. That’s why using a single marketing analytics solution like ChannelPulse to monitor all your data is beneficial. You’ll be able to: 

• See data from all your marketing campaigns and platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and YouTube, all on one dashboard
• Have the data automatically updated in real-time, rather than manually refreshing it 
• Analyze a single campaign that runs on several platforms in one place, avoiding the need to switch between various ad management platforms.
• Easily set up an A/B testing environment and continuously improve your ROI.

By now you probably realize how hard it is to make the most of marketing analytics without the right tool. But what does ‘right’ actually mean? We’ve talked to a few marketers to answer this question and many of them highlighted two key aspects:

1. The ability to see all the data from all their marketing campaigns in one place
2. Integrability and good data quality, which are difficult to maintain if you manually copy-paste data from multiple sources. 

With these in mind, here are some key features and capabilities you should look for in a marketing analytics tool:

• Cross-channel analysis – the tool should be able to analyze data from multiple channels including social media, PPC, email, etc. Only then you’ll be able to get a good overview of your marketing performance. 
• Data accuracy and consistency – it must ensure that the data is up-to-date and accurate.
• User-friendly interface – it should be easy to navigate around, even for those without any technical know-how.
• Scalable – as your data volume increases, the tool should be able to handle it without any hiccups. 
• Real-time analytics – this feature is crucial for quickly responding to changing market conditions or campaign performance fluctuations. It‘s useful for spotting mistakes that could eat through your budget or to gain momentum when a campaign is doing particularly well.
• Data security – your marketing data must be securely stored and protected. 
• Data integration – it should seamlessly integrate with multiple platforms like a CRM, social media, email marketing tools, website analytics, etc.

Before making a decision, it’s best to trial the tool, if possible, to make sure it meets all your needs and integrates with your existing tool stack. 

The answer is simple – because without it, you cannot measure ROI. Marketing is expected to generate profit, so you need to prove to the rest of the business that you spent the budget on activities that worked. 

By looking into the performance of your marketing channels, you’ll be able to decide which strategies or tactics brought anticipated results, and which ones were a disappointment. Knowing this will help you make the most of your marketing budget, and it will be easier for you to justify it. To perform marketing analytics correctly, you need marketing analytics tools that will help you collect, analyze, display, and understand data all in one place, without the need to switch between various software. If you’re searching for marketing analytics solutions that will do just that, then check out ChannelPulse. It’s a platform that helps businesses maximize their marketing ROI by bringing data from online paid campaigns across channels in real time and without the need for any tech know-how. Give it a go!