What Is Marketing Analytics? Everything You Need to Know About Data And Marketing

Understanding performance is essential for creating impactful marketing campaigns. Businesses today need to make sure they’re allocating the right budget to the right marketing channels to achieve a good return on investment. This is where marketing analytics is so important.

Marketing analytics forms a critical part of marketing today. It enhances efficiency, helps predict returns, and avoids wasted time and money on marketing investments. 

Follow this guide to understand marketing analytics and the different types of analytics in use.

What is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is the process of analyzing and managing data to help marketers evaluate the success of their initiatives. Marketing analytics measures marketing performance and covers various metrics to understand your return on investment (ROI).

Tracking and reporting on marketing analytics helps businesses understand how their marketing efforts are performing, and where they might identify room for improvement. This is necessary for continually delivering marketing campaigns that make an impact and developing sustained growth for any business.

Marketing analytics is a broad term that can apply to many different metrics and KPIs. For example, you could measure the traffic and click-through rate of a blog post to determine how well it’s performing. You could measure the conversion rate of different CTAs, or track the performance of your different social media channels. All of these different metrics give you a better insight into how your overall marketing strategy is performing. 

Without using marketing analytics to monitor campaigns, businesses could continue to do the same thing that doesn’t work. Marketing analytics are necessary for guiding new campaigns and optimizing existing ones. 

Learn more about the value of measurable ROI in our guide on . 

Components of Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics covers a few different areas. Here are some of the main components of marketing analytics solutions. 

Marketing Database

To make use of marketing analytics, you’ll need marketing data. The best way to access detailed data and track it is to keep the data in one place. This is where a centralized marketing database is important. 

The database must include historical information on the marketing campaigns, what the marketing programs’ attributes were, what impact campaigns had, how much they cost, and so on. Different marketing channels generally have their own database for analytics. 

Time-Series Analytics 

Time is an essential factor in understanding marketing trends. A time-series analysis gives marketers a clear picture of how their campaigns performed over time. This allows you to draw insights based on specific times. 

It’s important to use marketing channels and analytics platforms that provide historical information on different metrics. 

Easy Insights

Marketers these days need to make sense of data. However, not all marketers are business analysts, so they need an easy way to access and understand data. 

Marketing analytics platforms should include user-friendly dashboards that clearly illustrate data and the performance of different metrics over time. It should be easy for marketers to read and understand analytical insights. 

Attribution Capacity

Marketing technology that facilitates attribution reporting lets marketers understand the effect of certain events. Always understand the attribution capacities of different marketing platforms before using them. 

Many platforms have very basic attribution abilities - like first or last touch attribution. This could limit your attribution reporting later on. 

Reporting

The best marketing analytics platforms offer insightful reporting features. Ideally, this is in the form of on-demand reporting, which lets you generate reports and make sense of data when you need it. 

By offering reports in the form of tables and graphs, the marketing analytics data is much easier to understand. This lets marketers easily make sense of the different metrics they're tracking. 

5 Marketing Analytics Methods

Marketing analytics should take a strategic approach that monitors the right metrics to improve your ROI. Here are a few different methods you can take with marketing analytics. 

Single Attribution

Also known as first touch/last touch attribution, this is one of the most common analytics strategies. Basically, this analytics approach allocates the entire value to either the first or last interaction with a potential customer before they make a purchase. 

Single Attribution With Revenue Cycle Projections

This method of marketing analytics takes the single attribution model but also takes data from previous marketing campaigns to project a possible outcome of a similar campaign. This helps marketers gain a more accurate understanding of the results of their efforts.

Attribution Across Multiple Programs

This looks at data more broadly, following the idea that no sale can come down to a single marketing output. This form of marketing analytics measures the value of each touchpoint that a customer came into contact with along their journey.

Test and Control Groups

This style of analytics involves more control in the form of a test based on a specific control group. You set the metrics to monitor in advance, and see how they play out in a real-life scenario.

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)

MMM is the most complete approach that evaluates how every single marketing touch, including non-marketing variables, affects sales. This is a more complex marketing analytics strategy with many different factors to determine a result. MMM requires a lot of data. 

Read our guide to learn more about how to . 

Creating a solid marketing output requires the strategic use of analytics. Analytics shows businesses what’s working, where to allocate budget and how to optimize campaigns. Without analytics, businesses today would be lost in the dark. 

If you want to make the most of your marketing data, then consider using an advanced marketing analytics solution like Proof. Proof uses the most advanced powerful analytics tools to find the best possible insights to help you optimize your marketing efforts.  today to see how Proof can work for your business.