Digital Marketing Analytics: Beginner Tips for Marketers

Digital marketing analytics allow businesses to gather and analyze data to gain insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and patterns. Overall, analytics are at the core of data-driven decision making for most businesses. This article will address what digital marketing analytics are and some specific uses for market research, marketing strategy, campaign planning, and reporting.

What are digital marketing analytics?

Digital marketing analytics refer to the practice of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data to gain insights into the performance of digital marketing campaigns. This data can include things like website traffic, social media engagement, email open and click-through rates, and conversion rates — basically any action that a user takes that can be recorded by any aspect of a brand, agency, or publisher’s tech stack. By analyzing this data, businesses can gain insights into how their marketing campaigns are performing and make data-driven decisions to optimize their marketing strategies.

4 Key Benefits of Digital Marketing Analytics

Here are a few reasons why analytics help improve the efficiency and ROI of your digital marketing campaigns:

• A Better Understanding of Consumers: With digital marketing analytics, businesses can gain a better understanding of their target audience. By analyzing data such as demographics, browsing behavior, and purchase history, businesses can create more targeted marketing campaigns and digital advertising that resonate with their audience.
• Improved Marketing ROI: Improving ROI on marketing spend is one of the biggest challenges for marketing leaders. By identifying which marketing channels and campaigns are performing best, businesses can allocate their marketing budgets more effectively and drive better results.
• Real-Time Performance Monitoring: Data analytics provide businesses with real-time insights into how their marketing campaigns are performing. This allows businesses to make data-driven decisions and adjust their marketing strategies on the fly to improve results.
• Increased Personalization: People expect personalization, and personalization can improve conversion. Leveraging what businesses know about their customers through digital marketing analytics allows companies to put individuals’ behavior, preferences, and interests to work in delivering more effective campaign messaging.

3 Ways Marketers Can Use Analytics

Digital marketing analysis can be used for a wide range of use cases, including market research, marketing strategy, content marketing performance, search engine optimization, paid search, and other campaign planning and reporting. Let’s take a closer at some of these use cases and how your data analyst or data science team can help you develop a more mature marketing analytics approach:

• Market Research: Market research is much easier to do at scale when leveraging digital marketing analytics. By analyzing data such as age, gender, interests, and browsing behavior, businesses can create customer personas that help them understand their audience better. This information can then be used to develop data-driven marketing strategies for customer acquisition, product launches, market, and vertical expansion.
• Marketing Strategy: Companies can use what they know about their audiences to improve overall online marketing strategy. By leveraging persona development, site analytics, and trend reporting, businesses can create smarter marketing plans that are tailored to their audience. This can include seasonal and event campaigns, social media marketing, email marketing, and more.
• Campaign Planning & Reporting: Analytics can be used to personalize ad copy and creative, fine tune targeting strategy, and utilize campaign analytics and recommendations for continual optimization. By analyzing data such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement rates, businesses can optimize their campaigns in real time to drive better results. This can include A/B testing, ad targeting, landing page optimization, and more.

What Are Some Key Marketing Metrics to Track?

To get the most out of digital marketing analytics, businesses should track and measure several key metrics. Here is some of the most important marketing data to track:

• Traffic/Web analytics: Tracking website traffic can provide valuable insights into how users interact with a website. Businesses should track metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and time spent on site to understand how users engage with their website. Businesses most commonly use Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics for this but there are plenty of other solutions if you’re frustrated with either.
• Conversion rates: Conversion rates measure the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. Tracking conversion rates can help businesses understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.
• Engagement rates: Engagement rates measure how users interact with a website or social media content. Tracking engagement rates can help businesses better plan, schedule, and promote the content that will create the best relationships with its intended audience. 
• Return on investment (ROI): ROI measures the impact of marketing efforts. Having an analytics tool that helps track ROI can help businesses understand which marketing efforts are generating the most revenue and allocate resources more effectively.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV measures the total amount of revenue a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime relationship with a business. Tracking CLV can help businesses identify their most valuable customers and tailor their marketing efforts to retain them.

Get Data Empowered with Marketing Analytics

Digital marketing analytics are critical for businesses that want to stay competitive in today’s digital landscape. By unifying and analyzing data, businesses can gain insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and patterns, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their marketing strategies. Whether you’re conducting market research, developing a digital marketing strategy, or planning and reporting on campaigns, leveraging digital analytics is essential to achieving marketing goals.

Lotame’s end-to-end data collaboration platform, Spherical, offers users built-in analytics powered by one of the largest data marketplaces to inform privacy-first audience segmentation, growth and planning. Our platform empowers marketers to: 

• Enhance customer experience by identifying new dimensions of existing customers
• Improve digital marketing campaign performance with newly identified or more accurate audience growth market definitions
• Analyze and discover new dimensions of your first-party customer data and their activities, to build deeper and more effective customer relationships and improve customer acquisition strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to make your digital marketing analytics smarter, faster, and easier to use? Learn more about Spherical, or connect with one of our customer data experts. 

This article was written by Kristen Whitmore, VP, of Consumer Intelligence & Analytics.