How to Use Digital Marketing Analytics for Growth

Analytics has quickly become the catch-all term used for a variety of different business intelligence activities. 

More often than not, ‘analytics’ is used to describe the review of statistical and mathematical data that groups, segments, predicts, and scores what scenarios are most likely to happen. In other words, analytics is a predictive tool that can help your business anticipate what’s next.

Data-driven marketing is rapidly becoming a top priority for companies looking to grow in 2021. 40% of brands say they aim to increase their marketing analytics budgets this year.

Analytics can take many forms - from analyzing activity from a particular website domain, referred to as website analytics, to digital marketing analytics, which analyzes and reports on marketing data collected through a company’s digital channels where its brand holds a presence. Think Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, to name but a few.

In this article, the digital marketing experts at Galactic Fed demystify marketing analytics for you. We provide the what, why, and how when it comes to digital marketing analytics, helping you get to grips with what exactly marketing analytics is. If done well, it can help you better understand the behaviors and needs of your customers to grow your business.

What is marketing analytics? 

Source: Giphy

Marketing analytics is the activity of identifying patterns in data about your business - from customer feedback and market trends to what’s happening in the economy at any given moment. Your business can make better decisions about future digital marketing campaigns and business strategies by reviewing marketing analytics. 

Most businesses use marketing analytics for two vital tasks. The first task is to measure how well a current marketing campaign is performing. Using a combination of different analytic models, you’re able to determine the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign efforts.

The second task of marketing analytics is to help your company find out what it can do better. 

Using marketing analytics can reveal: 

• Ways to improve a product or service 
• Ways to improve your messaging 
• Customer pain points 
• Customer preferences
• Product and service trends that your customers are engaging with online
• What your competition is up to 

Why you should care about digital marketing analytics 

There are several benefits to utilizing digital marketing analytics, but the big three are:

• your ability to make better decisions about product updates, 
• brand positioning, 
• and customer experience. 

Let’s dive into more detail on each benefit:

Product and service updates 

Using marketing analytics, you can learn how to finesse your existing products and services to meet customer needs best. 

You’ll be able to identify which of your products or services your customers talk about most online, which ones receive the best feedback, the adjustments your customers want to see, and which of your competitors’ products and services that compare to yours are performing the best.

Brand positioning 

Insightful data about your key audiences and your existing marketing campaigns can reveal more effective ways to position your business. 

An example of this is discovering your customers prioritize the reliability of an essential service over the cost through customer marketing analytics. Your business can use this information to adjusting your brand’s image, promoting your service as the most reliable choice out there rather than the most affordable.

Customer experience 

It’s a lot easier to meet the needs of your customers when you know more about them. And with 86% of customers willing to pay more for a better customer experience, it’s worth putting some time and effort into improving your company’s customer experience.

Your business can zero in on which customer pain points are the most common using marketing analytics. 

Take product recommendations, for example. Suppose your marketing analyses show that your online shoppers tend to buy the same two of your products together frequently. In that case, you can use this data to suggest to your customers who are about to buy one of the products - automating a suggestion to add the other commonly purchased product: 

Source: Shopify

How marketing data analytics works

It’s all about key performance indicators (KPIs) when it comes to marketing analytics. Depending on what you want to learn about a specific campaign, you can use a particular model or a combination of models to help you assess the data. 

Suppose you want to review how well a specific landing page is performing when it comes to converting customers. You would use different modeling than you would say, reviewing what products or services your website visitors engage with most on your site. 

A handful of common analytic models include:

• Customer acquisition: helps your business discover prospects that you are likely to convert into customers.
• Upsell: helps your business determine which products or services are the most popular and which customers are likely to purchase them.
• Fast-track: helps you predict which customers are most likely to become high-value clients.
• Media mix: gives you the ability to look at aggregate data to provide long-term trends.

Online and offline data sources 

Marketing analytic models are nothing without robust data to provide accurate predictions for your business. To obtain this data, you need to rely on both online and offline sources. 

So, where do you get this data about your business? 

Common data sources include: 

• Website traffic analytics
• A/B tests
• Demographic data 
• Surveys
• Focus groups
• Ad performance data 
• Competition analysis

Collecting the data 

There are many software options available that can automate the collection of crucial marketing data for you. At the very least, get yourself a Google Analytics account. 

Source: Google Analytics 

Google Analytics makes it easy for your business to collect critical data that you can then use in your various marketing analytic models, including: 

• Pageviews
• Email and click-through rates (CTRs)
• Conversion rates
• Online shopping cart abandonment rate
• Number of unique visitors to your website
• Visitors via particular channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• The amount of time site visitors spend on a particular page
• Open, bounce, and unsubscribe rates of emails 
• Shares across social media 
• Social media followers

Want to know more about pulling data based on these marketing metrics? Check out our recent blog that goes into more detail on each. 

Using marketing analytics for impressive growth 

Whether you want to increase your click-through rate by 274% or increase organic traffic to your website by 372%, Galactic Fed is here to help. We are well-versed in all things data, which is how we are able to help businesses reach more customers than ever before.