What good is marketing if you have no way to track its effectiveness? Diving into marketing data from all sides gives you a truly unique perspective to better craft your messaging and reach a larger audience. When it comes to choosing the right analytics tool for your business, you’ll want to consider the key metrics you need to collect and analyze first.
Traffic source. How your marketing campaigns perform will largely hinge on where you are getting traffic from. Whether it be from a social media post or ad, a space ad on a website, or organically through a search engine query, you’ll want to be clear on how people are interacting with your marketing messages. With this insight, you can position your campaigns on the platforms that historically bring you the most traffic.
Clickthrough rates. Traffic is one small piece of the marketing analytics puzzle. Determining your campaign effectiveness will be driven by your clickthrough rates. Having a potential customer see your marketing advertisement is one thing, but if they then take the additional action to click through to a landing page or an order form is another ballgame. By having an analytics tool that enables you to track clickthrough rates, you’ll have a better understanding of what marketing campaigns are (at a bare minimum) engaging customers enough to click to learn more.
Demographic data. Do you know who your customers are, what age group they’re in, where they live, what income level they may have, even their marital status? These are all easily identifiable pieces of demographic data that you should be able to collect from your marketing analytics software. The more you can understand who your customers are, the more tailored you can make your marketing to immediately resonate with your target audience.
Customer value. Many e-commerce tools like Salesforce can give you both customer data from a marketing and a sales perspective. Knowing the characteristics and buying habits of your most valuable customers can help you effectively create promotions that speak directly to them when they are ready to buy. By understanding the role that your marketing has in driving your bottom line, you’re more empowered to make strategic business decisions. Plus, you’re less likely to be sucked in by “vanity metrics” that don’t move the revenue needle.
Your tool of choice for most of these foundational numbers will be Google Analytics, which is free to use. But, many tools that you use to create your e-commerce experience will also come with their own built-in analytics tools as well. The key is to leverage a robust marketing analytics program to give you a more granular understanding of certain areas of your business that will in turn empower you to create highly targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
