Digital marketing campaigns are crucial for all marketing teams. But you can’t just throw up a few Google pay-per-click ads or social media ads and expect the algorithms to work their magic and give you a competitive advantage.
Instead, you’ll need to analyze your initial ads and marketing campaigns, then course-correct or double down on what works to better convert your target visitors into paying customers. That means understanding marketing data analytics.
If you’re new to digital marketing or want to see improvements fast, read on. We’ll break down how marketing data analytics can boost your marketing campaign efforts in more ways than one.
Marketing data analytics is a predictive form of marketing analysis that involves gathering, analyzing, and informing strategy from marketing data metrics. Put more simply, marketing data analytics means:
Marketing data analytics is a key part of digital marketing, no matter what your brand’s industry or niche might be. Furthermore, marketing data analytics is important if you want your social media marketing and search engine marketing to thrive, particularly in competitive niches.
When leveraged correctly, marketing data analytics can provide numerous benefits to your brand and its long-term growth.
All marketing data analytics strategies will require you to gather and analyze specific metrics. It’s especially important to analyze those metrics both individually and holistically – that way, you can see how ads or marketing strategies work in isolation, as well as how they affect your broader marketing strategy in aggregate.
Let’s break down the different analytics you should consider for your marketing channels like PPC ads, social media ads, and more.
First up is revenue: a major business analytics metric you should already collect to understand how your business performs overall. However, you can also analyze the revenue generated from specific marketing channels or customer touchpoints.
For example, it is recommended that brands analyze the revenue you get from your PPC ad traffic, then compare that data set against the money you earn from your social media ad traffic. This way, you can directly compare both marketing channels and see which performs better overall. After that, you can use predictive analytics to determine what your return on investment will be.
Note that in data collection, revenue is not the same as profit. Revenue is your total income minus operating expenses, such as marketing fees, the cost of your PPC ads, and other costs. It’s not your “take-home” money.
ROAS, or return on ad spend, is another important marketing data metric to keep a close eye on when looking to profitably scale your advertising efforts. In a nutshell, ROAS measures the average return on your ad investment that you get for a specific advertisement or ad type.
Say that you spend $2,000 on an ad campaign, and you make $4,000 in revenue. That campaign’s ROAS is then $4000 divided by $2000 for a result of 2. This hypothetical example yields a return on ad spend of 2x or 200%, depending on how you choose to quantify ROAS.
Naturally, the higher your ROAS, the more successful a given ad or ad campaign is overall. ROAS is an important metric since it helps you analyze which marketing channels or strategies work better compared to others and allocate ad spend accordingly. If you have one marketing channel with a ROAS of 2 and another of 1.5, for example, it would be smart to dedicate more of your marketing resources to the former channel.
AOV, or average order value, tells you the average amount of money that a customer spends at your store or for your services. It’s a good metric to analyze since it shows how much money is required to spend on marketing to see a profit on average.
For instance, say that your average customer order value is $20, and you average about 200 orders a month. If this average order value is good for your industry — and if you haven’t spent more on advertising the product than you’ve earned back in product revenue — then you can continue with your strategy.
However, if your average order value is too low, you may need to adjust your marketing campaigns and shift to advertising pricier products instead.
LTV, or lifetime value, is a rough estimate of how much money an average customer can be expected to spend over their “lifetime” at your brand. A lifetime for this metric is the total length of time a customer shops at your store.
For example, imagine that you sell custom T-shirts to customers throughout the country. In general, an average customer buys two T-shirts from your brand before stopping further orders. Since each T-shirt is $10, that means the LTV is $20.
LTV can tell you:
Naturally, you’ll also need to measure and analyze the total conversions that your e-commerce store or website receives. Conversions are site visitors or brand leads that “convert” into paying customers.
The higher a conversion rate, the greater the percentage of site visitors who buy something from your organization. It’s always best to have a high conversion rate, which can be driven by quality digital marketing campaigns, captivating creative, compelling messaging, and so on.
Then there’s the click-through rate, or CTR. Put simply, the click-through rate tells you the percentage of people who click on your ad out of all the people who see your ad. It’s found with the following formula:
Clicks / impressions = CTR
A higher CTR indicates that your PPC or other digital ads are very compelling and converting. A lower CTR means you may need to go back to the drawing board and make sure all elements of your campaign are engaging your target audience.
Since there are so many different marketing metrics to analyze, it’s important to enlist the assistance of a digital marketing agency for your brand. MuteSix can help you gather and understand metrics from revenue to ROAS to LTV and much more.
When you gather, analyze, and implement marketing data analytics wisely, your marketing campaigns will likely see major improvements across the board. Every marketing dollar you spend will go farther, and each ad you put out will be more likely to convert at least one visitor or lead into a paying customer.
Here are some of the most notable benefits you might see when you start using marketing data analytics regularly.
Firstly, marketing data analytics can help you identify untapped growth opportunities for your business and your target audience’s relationship to it. For example, say that you sell both custom T-shirts and accessories like bracelets and custom jewelry.
Through careful data analysis of your marketing campaigns and what types of ads best engage shoppers, you discover that your target audience is just as interested in your custom jewelry as it is in your custom T-shirts. Armed with this information, you can then change your business model to focus more on providing custom jewelry or start offering special deals like a free piece of jewelry with every purchase of five T-shirts.
You can also optimize your decision-making for future ads to take advantage of new consumer behaviors, create better customer experiences, and even change your pricing strategies with the right analytics tools, machine learning, and big data solutions.
Next, marketing data analytics allows your business to make quick pivots in strategy – whether that’s switching up messaging or promoting different products when needed.
Imagine a scenario in which your customers suddenly stop placing as many online orders as before. You aren’t sure why, but marketing data analytics reveal that it’s because your shoppers aren’t clicking on your PPC ads as often as before. There might be a problem with a keyword or your current bid.
Since you know this information early on, you can quickly course correct and avoid any major blows to your revenue stream.
Perhaps most importantly, marketing data analytics allows you to acquire new customers and retain existing ones with greater efficiency. Both are important for the longevity of any business, but require different strategies and measurements.
For example, great marketing analytics helps you create new ads that speak to fresh visitors, converting them into paying customers from the moment they arrive on your site’s landing page. Furthermore, marketing analytics gives you greater actionable insights and understanding into your current customers. Then you can craft specific campaigns for them to ensure they don’t jump ship to a competing company.
The last point is important, especially since it usually costs more to acquire new customers than to retain them.
On top of all that, marketing data analytics can help you build brand awareness, which is especially important for younger brands. Brand awareness is important because it allows you to:
Marketing data analytics helps you do this by telling you which ad formats to produce, which keywords to compete for, and which audiences you should target.
Last but not least, marketing data analytics helps you drive more sales over the coming months and years. The stronger your marketing campaigns are, the more customers you direct to your site – and the more sales you’ll make.
Marketing data analytics can massively impact marketing campaigns by:
In short, marketing data analytics help keep brands on track so that they avoid wasted marketing dollars and drive boosted revenue instead
Although marketing data analytics have always been complex, the growing need for customer privacy has made it even harder for marketers to reliably track performance. Of note, Apple’s recent iOS 14+ and 15 updates have made shoppers more anonymous and digital marketing difficult as a result.
For example, Google Chrome will no longer allow third-party cookies for tracking website visitor behavior activities. Third-party cookies have historically been a major source of marketing data for advertisers and business owners, but with their demise marketers are forced to look at more holistic measurements and first-party data.
Similarly, Apple’s iOS 14 unleashed major implications for digital advertising and signal gathering. Specifically, Apple asks users if they would like to opt out of tracking via App Tracking Transparency, making it harder for advertisers to gather much-needed data given significant marketing data signal loss.
All of this means that marketers now need to evolve their approaches to gathering and analyzing marketing data. Fortunately, best-in-class digital marketing agencies like MuteSix are constantly staying at the forefront of data measurement so as to leverage and master more-reliable measurement solutions to continue driving success for brands.
MuteSix: Pioneering the Shift in Data Analytics
Unlike many other marketing agencies following outdated best practices, MuteSix has taken a dramatic shift in how data is collected, analyzed, and leveraged for brands. Rather than relying on soon-to-be-obsolete third-party data, or underreported attribution data, we turn to more advanced and reliable solutions, including:
In the post-iOS and post-third-party-cookie world, you need a marketing agency that can help you not only survive in it but thrive. MuteSix is the answer.
MuteSix’s Marketing Science Team is just what you need to gather and analyze marketing data more effectively than ever before. Using modern data architecture and custom data reporting technologies, the Marketing Science Team can provide strategic data aggregation and services like:
Best of all, each of these services is available to all of our clients at no extra cost. You can rely on MuteSix for all your marketing data analytics needs!
In the end, marketing data analytics is a necessary part of any successful online marketing effort. MuteSix can help your brand not just survive but thrive in the modern marketing environment, even with the removal of third-party cookies and other restrictions. Contact us today and see how we can help your business succeed!
Sources:
Apple’s Stunning iOS 14 Privacy Move: A Game-Changer For All iPhone Users | Forbes
Google Has a New Plan to Kill Cookies. People Are Still Mad | WIRED