One of the greatest challenges facing marketing teams today is measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Whether it’s your email sequencing, calls to action, lead generators, or anything else, it’s crucial to keep an eye on the prize to ensure you’re on the right track with your marketing strategies.
While you should still analyze web traffic, bounce rate, unique visitors, and most-viewed pages with web-based metrics like Google Analytics, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the analytics game.
Effective marketing teams need access to deeper data to evaluate the impact of marketing campaigns to see conversion rates and the buyer’s journey through the sales funnel you’ve created.
What Is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics is the way you study the behavior of users on your website and other marketing platforms. Once you gather the information, you can improve your marketing strategy to get the biggest bang for your buck.
Marketing analytics helps you see patterns between campaign conversions, consumer behavior, regional preferences, creative ads, and more. Bottom line, these analytics help develop the whole picture of your marketing efforts and see how each piece works together to create a successful marketing strategy.
Why Do I Need Marketing Analytics?
To put it simply, the more you understand how your customers move from website click to sale, the more you can optimize their journey. You may be keeping your sales team busy with qualified leads, it doesn’t mean you can’t improve. In today’s digital age, marketing is becoming more and more competitive. Getting the right analytics is critical to your bottom line and keeping profits up.
Consumers are very selective about which brands they interact with. So, if you want to catch your ideal customer’s attention, you have to have the right analytics to create targeted experiences based on individual interests.
Marketing campaigns created on broad demographic assumptions miss the mark these days. You want to provide the right content in the right way and on the right channel to bring in qualified leads and convert them into paying customers.
Knowing all the metrics available and what analytics you need to watch may feel like an overwhelming task. Still, we’re here to help you navigate the rough waters of monitoring analytics. Here’s our top ten list of marketing analytics to follow.
Four Analytics to Monitor
#1. Web Analytics
Yes, web analytics are still relevant. However, the way you use the data is a bit different than it used to be. Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics software out there.
But the amount of data it provides can be overwhelming, and knowing what you need is confusing. If you’re using Google Analytics, there are three main areas to focus on:
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Users – The number of unique (a person who has visited your site at least once) visitors to your website.
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Pageviews – How many times has a specific page of your website been viewed. Google Analytics allows you to break this down by page, channel, campaign, etc.
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Goal Completions – Unique goals you can set in Google Analytics. You can set up goals to track how many users reach a signup page.
Sounds simple, right? Well…..there might be more to the picture than you think. Sometimes navigating the analytics for these three areas can be confusing and challenging to set up. One tool that we like is HubSpot.
With HubSpot Analytics, you have a better way of organizing the metrics by using their filters from the dashboard. Instead of searching around for what you’re looking for, it’s all right at your fingertips.
#2. Content Analytics
Writing content is more than writing blogs, web copy, and other written materials. It’s also looking at the data and determining the type of content that resonates with buyers. You’re looking for topics that make people click and convert.
In addition to relevant topics, you need to know if you’ve presented the content in a way that makes sense for your audience. A few of the metrics to evaluate for content are:
Content Performance
Measure things like video plays, time spent on an article, and scroll depth. These help determine how engaged your audience is with the content you’re publishing.
How Content is Discovered
Look at user journeys (flow metrics) and behavior mapping (what pages people start on and where they go) to see how visitors interact with the pages of your website.
Keywords
Look for commonly searched words and terms to determine what people are searching for to find you.
Type of Content
Get rid of the guesswork for content creation. Look at the content performance and sources to find the type of content that resonates with the audience and through which channels.
Marketing Channel
Are visitors finding you organically through a search engine, or are more coming from your email campaigns? Compare this data to see which channels are working best and give you direction on creating content that reaches the greatest number of people.
Tracking the success of your content marketing helps you generate more targeted content and ensure that it is relevant to your ideal customer.
#3. Search Engine Optimization
You know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to getting people to find you on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but are you tracking the data fed back to you? You spend lots of time finding keywords and key phrases that people search for to find you. Make sure that it’s working for you.
Measuring the impact of SEO takes a little time to begin gathering because SEO performance is a metric that happens over time and not immediately. A few of the essential metrics to analyze for your SEO are:
Quality of Search traffic
Looking at traffic helps determine what keywords and the associated pages drive the most interest. It’s also helpful to analyze how engaged those visitors are, see where they go after leaving the page and if a call-to-action might increase engagement.
Internal Search Data
Beyond what visitors search for on the internet, they may also be searching your website. If your site has a search function, evaluating this information is a great way to find ideas for content. It also helps you understand the wording people use when looking for answers and items on your website.
Track How Search Fits Your Broader Strategy
SEO alone doesn’t help you achieve your marketing goals. It’s vital to track how your search strategy is driving your team goals. Analyze goal or key metric completions on an excellent indicator that your efforts impact the way people search for you and within your website.
#4. Campaign Performance
Monitoring campaign performance is more than seeing the end result of conversions. You should be analyzing the entire lifecycle of a campaign. This involves everything from planning to executing and optimizing. Data is critical to making informed decisions on the distribution channels to invest in, understanding the engagement with a specific campaign, and if it’s doing what you intended it to do. The following metrics should be measured to understand campaign performance and the improvements needed.
Urchin Tracking Model (UTM) Parameters
UTM parameters need consistent naming conventions to track campaign performance properly. It’s how you filter traffic by campaign, source, term, and medium. UTM provides you with a ton of insight into campaigns that you wouldn’t otherwise have. It shows where the most traffic is coming from, which channels have a high bounce rate, and which sources provide the most engaged users.
Overall Campaign Performance
Creating and optimizing campaigns is at the heart of marketing. Checking one campaign against another by running a comparison campaign helps provide deeper metrics like campaign ROI and cost per conversion.
All marketing campaigns should be created with a goal in mind. The goal can be generating new leads, conversions, getting you pageviews, and form completion. No matter your goal, analyzing the actions from your campaigns helps you see the impact of each campaign and provide you with data to create new, more targeted campaigns.
Ensure Success With Selworthy
Whether you’re an established marketer or just starting, metrics are at the core of performance monitoring. Don’t let all the numbers confuse and frustrate you.
Let Selworthy help provide you with the right information you need and help you run successful campaigns and marketing initiatives. Selworthy is a HubSpot Gold Certified Agency Partner. We have the expertise and ability to help you create and implement email marketing campaigns that work.
Our goal is to help businesses like yours build a strong brand, craft effective strategies, and drive revenue to your business. It’s our mission to help you create your success story. Schedule a call today and let one of our team members show you how we do what we do.
