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Marketing is critical for any business and has evolved greatly over the years. Businesses today engage in several marketing activities across social channels including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, using varied mediums such as text, audio and video. With so much content being produced every day, it becomes essential to take a data driven, experimental approach to maximize positive impact for your business.
In 2023, companies had set aside approximately 13.6% of their total budget for marketing (Source: HubSpot). This is a significant figure – if you’re not monitoring your return on investment, those ad dollars could very well be doing more harm than good for your business by acquiring irrelevant audiences.
You may already have some analytics in place to monitor the impact of your marketing activities, but if you’re having trouble extracting actionable insights, you might require a revamp. Outlined below are some actions you can take TODAY to take your marketing analytics to the next level.
Do you really need 50 KPIs in one dashboard? Having so many graphs and tables in one place can make it difficult to sift through information and make decisions. Cut the noise by removing all those graphs that you don’t need or that don’t share any useful information. Anything that you want to keep but requires more introspection on how it can be used should be transferred to another repository.
Marketing analytics tools like Tableau offer sample dashboards that anyone can learn from and implement. The dashboard below is a great example of a high-level, minimalistic view of a few significant marketing KPIs.
Figure 1 Marketing Investment Performance (Source: Tableau)
You may have lots of data within your marketing analytics, but you notice it doesn’t match the engagement metrics or conversion data you’re seeing on Google Analytics and ad platforms. This means you need to conduct a source to destination data validation exercise to ensure the data being pulled is accurate. Data validation is a core tenet of our approach to data engineering at Data Pilot, especially when working with complex or multiple data sources.
When it comes to data accuracy, creating a single source of truth for all your marketing data, like a data warehouse, may also help. Salesforce describes how the created this single source of truth for all their customer data using AWS tools, ultimately helping them improve their offerings, customer experience, save costs and automate processes (Source: AWS).
Optimizing conversion rates may be a jointly owned objective between marketing and sales, but the former plays a pivotal role in ensuring sales teams receive high quality leads.
To get started, make sure you define which specific user action signifies a conversion for your business. This is unique to every business, e.g., an item purchased, an event registration or subscription, a ride hailed, or room booked, etc. Once this is determined, you can setup event tracking to record actions taken on your website and/or application by users as a conversion on your marketing analytics platform.
A sample dashboard by Looker can be viewed below, displaying conversion metrics. The event action signaling conversion is “product click”.
Figure 2 Custom Goal Conversions (Source: Looker)
Having trouble comparing campaign stats? Data driven marketing solutions like the implementation of UTM parameters can be immensely useful here.
Using UTM parameters within Google Analytics can help you standardize and track campaign performance. An interesting use-case of this is being able to see where your website or app users are coming from. You can do this by implementing UTM source tracking for your campaign, i.e., where did a user first see your campaign that landed them on your website? Comparing this across campaigns can help shed light on which sources are consistently funneling more leads through, and hence which sources to double down on in terms of marketing efforts.
Other UTM parameters that are commonly used are medium and campaign. These parameters can give you exact visibility on where, how and why users are visiting your platform or converting.
Figure 3 UTM Parameters (Source: CXL)
This can be especially interesting for businesses that experience seasonal effects and run similar campaigns at a certain time every year. Comparing last year’s campaign success with the current year can help businesses do a pulse check to see what still works versus what needs to be revamped.
Additionally, studying data on an aggregate yearly level instead of quarterly or monthly may also help mitigate the effect of seasonality on demand for your product or service as there may be certain periods in the year when demand peaks or falls – holiday season, for example (Source: Investopedia). For a YoY comparison, it may then also help to look at that holiday season and see how sales performed during that period across multiple years.
For reference, see the graph below showing subscriber growth for Netflix for the years 2018-2021. This visual makes it easy to see the delta between eac successive year. A drastic drop from one year to the next, as can be seen from 2020 to 2021, would be a major cause for concern for business users.
Figure 4 Subscriber Growth at Netflix (Source: TechCrunch)
Conclusion
When it comes to marketing analytics, cleaning up your visuals and figuring out the best way to get the information you need to make decisions, is just the tip of the iceberg. Reviewing your KPIs, checking data accuracy, tracking and optimizing conversion events, and measuring yearly performance, are some quick solutions you can start implementing today.
The demand for sophisticated analytics tools is growing as tech companies set out to solve increasingly complex problems, build the right audiences, and maximize return on investment. Once you have the proper foundation, there is a huge opportunity to leverage marketing insights in the areas of predictive analytics (to start anticipating user engagement and traffic), as well as personalization (to tailor each user’s journey on your platform for increased retention and lifetime value).
For more information and hands-on marketing analytics consulting, reach out to our experts at Data Pilot who can help you set up your analytics from scratch or revamp what you’re already using for maximum impact! Our team will guide you through each step of the process, from deciding what needs to be visualized to which analytics tools to use.
By Manaal Shuja.
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