How important is the analysis of marketing data?

Marketing analysis is often seen as limited to website performance such as traffic, bounce rate or number of unique visitors, but measuring the overall effectiveness of marketing efforts can be much more complex and challenging.

Indeed, website analysis can provide a lot of data and information related to the technical performance of your website, but marketers need much richer data to understand the performance of their marketing campaigns, which web analytics alone cannot provide.

The difference between web analytics and marketing analytics
Web analytics measure important data for a webmaster, such as the time it takes to load pages, the pages viewed on each visit and the time spent on the site.

Marketing analytics, on the other hand, measures performance indicators such as traffic, number of leads generated and number of sales or customers. It also allows you to study which events, on your website or outside, influence prospects to become, or not, customers. It includes data not only from your website, but also from other sources such as email, social networks and even offline events. He is generally interested in the lead environment, while web analytics generally consider the page as a unit of measurement in his reports.

Thanks to marketing analytics, marketers can understand the effectiveness of their marketing, not just the effectiveness of their website. They can identify how each of their marketing initiatives compares to others, determine the true return on investment of their activities and understand how they are achieving their objectives.

Thanks to the information gathered with marketing analytics, they can also discover weaknesses in specific channels, and thus adjust their strategies and tactics to improve their overall marketing program.

Measuring efficiency: a challenge for marketers

According to the report on the state of inbound marketing, 40% of marketers have difficulty proving the ROI of their marketing campaigns.

Web analytics is the main measurement tool used to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, but it is not enough to establish the ROI of a marketing campaign.

However, marketing analytics is still little used, probably due to a lack of cohesion.

Indeed, most marketers need to set up different marketing analytics platforms to gather all the necessary data, understand their marketing performance and make informed decisions.

They collect data on their e-mailing campaign using the analytical tools offered by their e-mail service provider, information on their performance on social networks using a monitoring tool, analyses on their blog using their blogging platform, etc.

Since this process is tedious, it is not surprising that marketers focus mainly on tools such as Google Analytics and have difficulty measuring the effectiveness of their marketing.

Why are marketing analytics so important?

Web analytics does not offer enough information and its data is not sufficient for marketers.

Marketing goes far beyond the scope of your website. It is by cross-checking the interactions between your marketing channels and the results on the other side that you will get the most information about your marketing.

You can spend countless hours examining and analyzing data in your web analytics tools, comparing new visitors to recurring visitors month after month, but ultimately, you will not achieve a thorough understanding of your marketing performance. Here is how marketing analytics can fill this gap.

What marketing analysis can offer you

1 – Integration within different marketing channels

Marketing analysis provides you with a reliable and solid overview of the direct relationships established between your marketing channels. It is very interesting to be able to evaluate the performance of each channel (social networks, blog, e-mail marketing, SEO, etc.) but the real power of analysis comes into play when you can easily link the performance of different channels together.

Suppose you have sent an e-mail to some of your prospects via your segmented list. Marketing analysis can tell you how many people clicked on a link in your email to reach your website, but also how many of them actually became leads once on your site.

2 – Data focused on the person and the customer’s life cycle

Marketing analysis helps you to know how a lead alone reaches your website for the first time, whether it is one of your newsletter subscribers, whether it often clicks on marketing offers offered by e-mail and much more.

It will provide you with an extremely useful prospecting intelligence that you can apply to marketing initiatives such as lead nurturing.

In addition, studying all this aggregated information will help you understand trends among your prospects and leads, as well as determine which marketing activities offer the best added value during the different stages of your sales cycle.

You may find that many customers have reached their conversion point on one or more specific marketing offers. This data will give you the opportunity to set up an effective lead management process, through which you can rate and prioritize your leads, and identify activities that help create qualified leads for your company.

3 – Closed loop data

The most attractive feature of marketing analytics is its ability to link marketing activities to sales. Your blog may be effective in generating traffic and leads, but do they turn into customers and increase your revenue?

Closed-loop marketing analytics can answer this question. All you have to do is link your marketing analytics system to your CRM.

This closed-loop data will help you determine whether each of your marketing initiatives really contributes to your overall strategy. This will allow you to know which channels are the most important to increase your sales. You may learn that your blog is the most effective channel for generating customers or, conversely, that social networks function only as a mechanism for engagement, but not as a source of sales.

What you can achieve with marketing analytics

The information and data that a marketing analytics tool collects is only useful if you use it. The true value of analyses is not only used to prove to your manager that your marketing activities are achieving sufficient results to justify your time and budget.

It can also help you improve and optimize your marketing performance, not only on a channel-by-channel basis, but also as part of a global system that includes all your channels.

This article has introduced you to some of the ways you can use analyses, but you will get much more results if you use them wisely. By relying solely on web analytics, you are missing a vital set of data that can help you optimize your marketing strategy.

When evaluating the analysis tools for your company, whether they are HubSpot’s analysis tools or other platforms, make sure they offer features related to marketing analysis, not just the website.

However, for the data to be useful, they must be interpreted and presented in a convincing way. This skill is essential for the development of a career and a company.