Data is the new powerhouse. Businesses across industries need more thoughtful, more productive, and analytical approaches to compete with the data-first strategy. Marketers started utilizing various attribution models to dive deeper into consumer behavior. These models calculated the value of each consumer touchpoint to discover where and when a person interacted with a brand. Multitouch attribution allows marketers to track a customer’s journey across various devices and channels.

Today, marketing analytics is a common practice in most businesses. The availability of advanced analytics tools and the amount of data has enabled marketing teams to examine every part of their digital marketing initiatives, offering businesses a 360-degree perspective of the client and running marketing campaigns effectively to maximize revenue and reduce costs.

Marketing analytics is the study of data to evaluate marketing activity performance. By applying technology and analytical processes to marketing-related data, businesses can understand what drives consumer actions, refine their marketing campaigns, and optimize their return on investment.

How can Marketing Analytics help?

• Derive insights from the massive data available from various sources, including social media, lead generation, and conversion, regional sales, income generated, rival sales, etc.
• Detect channel effectiveness and efficient use of marketing budget across various channels
• Analyze the insights and improve the results of your current marketing efforts
• Compare your marketing efforts to those of your competitors to decide the marketing budget and channels.

KPIs for marketing effectiveness

The marketing funnel consists of stages, each representing actions and outcomes to take the lead towards conversion to a customer. There are different KPI metrics to measure in various marketing funnel stages. The top of the Funnel (TOFU) KPIs are related to awareness, branding, and channels. The Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) KPIs drive visitors back to your site and convert visitors to leads. And the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) KPIs is measured with the sole goal of transitioning the earliest leads into loyal customers.

KPIs at the Top of the Funnel

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is measured by how much traffic is coming from searches, including the brand name or product/service name. It shows the attention of the audience to your offer or brand

Traffic by Channel

Traffic by channel allows tracking the traffic to a channel – whether through emails, social media, direct, call center, influencers, or anything else. Tracking this enables marketers to focus on specific channels to maximize the organic traffic.

Site Engagement Rate

The site engagement rate gives an idea of which website areas interest the users most. The engagement rate can be measured using KPIs like bounce rate, audience retention, new visits, percentage of unique visitors, page views per session, and a heatmap of a single visitor on the website.

Organic Traffic

“organic traffic” is used to refer to the visitors that land on the website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results. The organic traffic can be increased by blogs and using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is the segment of traffic that arrives on your website through another source outside your domain, including banner ads such as AdWords. Referral traffic can be a strong indicator of which external sources are most valuable in helping your business achieve its goals.

Influencer Attribution

Influencer attribution KPIs can be measured by the average reach and impressions of each post, influencer’s audience engagement relative to the size of their audience and influencer’s audience growth rate. To demonstrate the ROI for an influencer, the revenue from social channels attributed to the influencer can be used.

Lead Conversion Ratio

Lead Conversion Ratio, also called contact-to-customer conversion rate, measures the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action. It is the percentage of visitors who come to the website and are captured as leads for online platforms. This rate is often used to indicate how successful the company is at attracting the right kind of audience. It helps organizations comprehend client behavior and fine-tune marketing campaigns to nurture potential leads and quickly convert them in the future. The main aim should be to minimize the friction in the funnel, eliminate steps, and reduce delays, allowing the visitor arriving at your site to make quick, profitable action.

KPIs at the Middle of the Funnel

Offer Conversion Rate

The offer conversion rate indicates the number of landing page visits for every lead received. It measures entrants into the funnel that have moved to the next stage. For social media, this is measured by the growth of the company’s followers – the number of people discovering the profile divided by the number of people following the page. Improving your copy by using attractive lead magnets and landing pages can increase the conversion rate.

Visitor recency

Visitor recency indicates the length of time between multiple visits of the same person to the website. It measures returning direct visitors who know your brand well and continue to come back.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

MQL are the leads who have engaged with the company and could become serious prospects if appropriately nurtured. The marketing team can measure how many MQLs become SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) and then customers..

Post/Email Open Rate

If people subscribe to emails or follow social media, they should interact with the content by opening the email or post. This measure tells how effective your email subject lines or Posts are for your target consumers..

KPIs at the Bottom Of the Funnel

Funnel stage analysis

This analysis shows the number of leads entering a stage vs. the number that progressed to the next stage. It is a good indicator of the effectiveness of marketing at that stage.

Attribution Report

Attribution reports allow marketers to create advanced reports by URL, source, or referrer to better understand what marketing efforts lead to conversions throughout the funnel.

Retention Rate

Retention rate indicates customers who renew their subscription service or repeat customers who buy the same or different product or service from you.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a marketing metric that measures the amount of revenue earned for every dollar spent on advertising. A ROAS at that level provides ROI on your actual hard advertising costs and the associated costs like salaries, vendor costs, etc. By combining ROAS with other metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per lead (CPL), and cost per click (CPC), advertisers get a complete picture of the KPIs they need to hit to reach specific revenue targets. The unit economics are calculated by comparing Earning Per Click (EPC) with Cost Per Click (CPC).

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the amount of money a company spends to get a new customer. It helps measure the return on investment of efforts to grow the clientele. CAC is calculated by adding the costs associated with converting prospects into customers (marketing, advertising, sales personnel, and more) and dividing that amount by the number of customers acquired.

Customer Life Time Value (CLTV)

Customer lifetime value is a metric that indicates the total revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer throughout the business relationship

CLTV : CAC

The Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost (CLTV : CAC) ratio measures the relationship between the lifetime value and the cost of acquiring that customer. The CLTV : CAC ratio is calculated by dividing CLTV by CAC..

CLTV : CAC

Is a signal of profitability. This metric tells you if the lifetime value is higher or lower than the marketing and sales costs to acquire that customer and is an important metric to track for the sustainability of the marketing spend in the long term.

Data sources for marketing analytics

Data needs to be pulled from various sources across the organization to calculate all the KPIs and get an accurate 360-degree view of the customer. This data is processed in the data analytics stack, and the resulting descriptive analytics with KPI reports are used to fine-tune the marketing campaigns.

The marketing data can be gathered from events captured from the web portal and mobile apps, data from social media and advertising platforms, call center data, in-store and online sales data, marketing automation platforms, customer service data, customer surveys, and legacy historical data.

Conclusion

Marketing data analytics allows you to run effective and efficient marketing campaigns and provide a better customer experience. Descriptive marketing analytics measures the current state and helps the marketing team manually tweak the campaigns to achieve the optimal goal. Predictive and prescriptive analytics automatically suggests the best path based on historical learning. For example, an optimal media mix model (MMM) suggestion based on predictive analytics can augment human decision-making to provide the best bang for the marketing buck. Overall, marketing analytics can lead to better supply and demand planning, price optimization, and robust lead nurturing and management – all of which lead to greater profitability.