18 Jun Why Should Marketing Analytics Be In Your Tool Kit?
Which campaigns were the most successful? How do you prove the value of each campaign?
The beauty of online marketing is that every action your visitors take is tracked and stored somewhere – this represents a tectonic shift for marketing strategy. Rather than relying on your gut to decide how well your ideas are working, marketers can now use data to dissect campaigns, and glean true insight into their ROI . With marketing analytics ability to improve campaign effectiveness, it’s easy to see why chief marketing officers increased their spending on marketing analytics by 60% in 2015.
Conversion rates for offers vary by type and by channel – ebooks generally perform better than webinars, and organic, email and social media channels all produce different submission rates. Using this information, we carefully select what campaigns we design for each channel, and evaluate how each new offer performs based on past channel performance.
The key to successful marketing is accountability, and being able to learn from every campaign to improve the next.
Integrating Analytics Into Your Campaign Strategy
To measure the results of your marketing campaigns, you need to look at your performance data. Site analytics will help you improve your marketing strategy and collect insight on campaign performance, such as:
• How well your campaigns convert visitors and leads
• How specific marketing campaigns are faring compared with one another
• How effectively your campaigns are delivering ROI and revenue
The specific metrics that will best predict your campaigns effectiveness will vary by your business and target market. For a complete picture of how your campaigns are faring, be sure to look at a variety of measures, including: traffic, submission and conversion rates; raw data such as total new leads and engagement by channel (e.g., how many total tweets or likes did a campaign achieve); and comparative metrics such as new leads/contacts.
Make sure you delve deeply enough to be thorough, and use common sense when looking at your numbers. Your newest email campaign could have a 5% click through rate. Wow! But if 90% of those people are clicking on the unsubscribe link, your email is actually a giant failure. Be sure to look at what your data means, in addition to just the hard numbers.