What Is Marketing Analytics?
The aim of marketing analytics is to optimize return on investment (ROI). In order to do this, you must be able to see your marketing performance. Yet, tracking the marketing metrics is only part of the picture. The data in itself doesn’t accurately reflect your business. Adding the analytical layer to the metrics, allows you to put those performance metrics in context of your business. It’s only then that the data becomes a tool for future marketing guidance. So marketing analytics is the process of gathering and tracking marketing performance, in the context of your business, in order to inform future marketing efforts and increase ROI.
The first step in marketing analytics is to actually track the marketing metrics- the data. A variety of tools are used to accomplish this.
What Are Common Marketing Analytics Tools?
Web Analytics
The most common analytic tool for tracking web assets is Google Analytics. It’s a free tool, with valuable insights right out of the gate. Custom reports, dimensions, filters, variables, triggers, and tags can be combined to track just about anything! It’s even possible to track your off-page campaigns through Google Analytics.
Visual Behavior Analytics
Hotjar and Lucky Orange are two of our favorite visual behavior analytics tools. These tools allow you to track how your website users actually interact with your page. This is done through heat maps & mouse/scroll recordings among other things. Google Analytics could tell you that people are exiting your site at a higher rate from a certain page. Adding visual behavior analytics can allow you to see why that is!
SEO Analytics
SEO Analytics allow you to see what users are actually searching for, assess page SEO health, backlinks, and more. Our favorite tool for this is Semrush.
Social Media Analytics
Each social platform have analytics tool to help you see how posts and campaigns are performing. Facebook Insights is particularly useful for most clients. You can see how people have engaged with your Facebook campaign, demographic info, click through rate to your website or landing page, revenue generated, and more.
Email Analytics
Email analytics can be handled in several ways. Each platform has analytics that allow you to see performance metrics. Some of these are better than others. Then there are tools like Hubspot that can give you a more integrated view of what’s going on, yet those can get pretty expensive. It really goes back to the needs of the client. Understanding the most important metrics for your business and workflows is key to implementing the tool that will give you the information needed, without unnecessary cost.
What Are Some Marketing Analytics That Should Be Tracked?
Web Analytics
Page Views:
This is the how many pages of your website a user viewed.
Sessions:
A session is a group of interactions a user has with your website within a certain time frame. This is often from when a user enters your website domain, until they exit your domain.
Users:
This is how many visitors had at least one session with your website.
New Users:
Just what it sounds like! The number of first-time users.
Average Session Duration:
The average amount of time a session lasts.
Bounce Rate:
This is a really important metric. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who exit from your site after briefly viewing only one page. A high bounce rate means less revenue, and optimization is needed.
Conversion Rate:
Conversion rate tells you the percentage of users that completed a goal. This could include submitting a form, clicking a CTA, or actually buying a product.
Traffic by Channel:
This allows you to segment your traffic to better understand where it is coming from.
Traffic by Device:
This tells you what kind of device people are using to browse your website. (Mobile, Desktop, etc.)
Time on Page:
Time on page is another metric that can lead to value insights. It shows you the average amount of time a user spends on your site or webpage.
Call-to-Action (CTA) Click-Through Rate:
CTA click-through rate (CTR) tells you how many people are clicking a “call to action” (button).
Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate:
This is yet another super important metric to make sure and track! Your cart abandonment rate tells you how many people are putting a product into their cart, but not finishing the checkout process. There can be a bunch of different reasons for this, so clear visibility into your cart engage is really, really important!
Funnel Drop Off:
This shows you where people are exiting your customer journey.
Cart Win Back Rate:
Cart win back rate is the percentage of users that abandon a cart, then get an email or other interaction asking them to finish checking out, and then come back and actually finish buying the item that was in their cart.
SEO Metrics
Organic Traffic:
This is the traffic that comes from Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This traffic is influenced by the keywords, domain authority, and other SEO ranking factors on your website.
Keyword Ranking:
This is how well your webpages rank in search engines for relevant/target keywords.
Branded Keyword Searches:
This is when users are searching for your brand or website directly. For example, instead of a user typing in a search query into a browser, they are typing in your product or website name.
Organic Conversion Rate:
This connects to “organic traffic”, but just segments the conversions on your website by those who found your website through searching keywords.
Social Media Metrics
Social Media Engagement:
This is the basis of all social media metrics. These metrics measure how well your posts are being received by your social following. The most common engagement metrics are: likes, comments, and shares.
Audience Growth:
This metric just shows the change in number of followers of your brand.
Social Media Channel Traffic:
This metric tells you how much traffic is referred to your website from your social media accounts.
Email Marketing Metrics
Delivery Rate:
This metric shows how many or the percentage of users who received your email. This is important to understand how to clean your list, and fix problems your email service may be having with spam bots or other things blocking your emails.
Open Rate:
The open rate is the percentage of recipients who actually opened your email.
Click-Through Rate (CTR):
CTR is the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link that was included in the body of the email.
Conversion Rate:
The conversion rate is the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in the email, and then completed a conversion on your website.
Unsubscribes:
This metric shows how many recipients chose to opt-out of your email list. Some of these recipients tell you why, some don’t. But crafting a compelling and clear way to gather this information is valuable, and sometimes saves them from opting out all together.
- Opens by Device:
This metric shows information about the device used to open your email. This is important to understand to be able to optimize your emails for the best end user experience.
Paid Ad Metrics
Click-Through Rate (CTR):
CTR is the percentage of users that clicked on your ad versus the number of times it was viewed ( impressions).
Cost per Click (CPC):
This is the money spent for each time your ad was clicked. This metric can changed based on the type of campaign, location of add, ad copy, ad creative, and other factors. Optimization of all these factors is important to get the lowest CPC possible and in turn highest return on ad spend (ROAS).
Conversion Rate for Paid Ads:
This is the number of users who clicked on your ad and then completed the goal of the ad. Goals can be an opt-in, increased awareness of your brand, the purchase of a product, or others.
Cost per Conversion (CPC):
CPC shows the money spent to complete one conversion. This is calculated by dividing the total ad spend, by the number of conversions. For example, if you have 10 conversions after spending $100, then the cost per conversion is $10.
Most businesses don’t have a way to track their marketing efforts, let alone have marketing analytics that gathers the efforts from multiple channels. There are varying degrees of tracking that can be employed depending on the business needs. Let us help you increase your ROI through marketing analytics today!