2. Introduction
Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to
maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI)
Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer profound
insights into customer preferences and trends
Despite these compelling benefits, a majority of organizations fail to ever realize the promises of
marketing analytics
According to a survey of senior marketing executives published in the Harvard Business Review, "more
than 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI"
However, with the advent of search engines, paid search marketing, search engine optimization, and
powerful new software products from Word Stream, marketing analytics is more powerful and easier to
implement than ever
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Decision Analytics
supports human
decisions with visual
analytics that the user
models to reflect
reasoning
Descriptive Analytics
gains insight from
historical data with
reporting, scorecards,
clustering etc.
Predictive Analytics
employs predictive
modelling using statistical
and machine learning
techniques
Prescriptive Analytics
recommends decisions using
optimisation, simulation, etc.
Types of analytics
4. Why marketing analytics is important
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Over the years, as businesses expanded into new marketing categories, new technologies were adopted to support
them. Because each new technology was typically deployed in isolation, the result was a hodgepodge of
disconnected data environments.
Consequently, marketers often make decisions based on data from individual channels (website metrics, for
example), not taking into account the entire marketing picture. Social media data alone is not enough
Web analytics data alone is not enough. And tools that look at just a snapshot in time for a single channel are
woefully inadequate.
Marketing analytics, by contrast, considers all marketing efforts across all channels over a span of time – which is
essential for sound decision making and effective, efficient program execution.
5. 4
Marketing analytics, Internet (or Web) marketing analytics in particular, allow you to monitor campaigns and
their respective outcomes, enabling you to spend each dollar as effectively as possible.
The importance of marketing analysis is obvious: if something costs more than it returns, it's not a good
long-term business strategy.
In a 2008 study, the Lenskold Group found that "companies making improvements in their measurement and
ROI capabilities were more likely to report outgrowing competitors and a higher level of effectiveness and
efficiency in their marketing." Simply put: Knowledge is power.
Cont…
6. What marketing analytics can do for you
There are quite a few things that marketing analytics achieves where website analytics falls short.
Let's highlight three of the main differentiators:
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1. Integration Across Different Marketing
Channels
With marketing analytics, you have a good, solid
look into the direct relationships between your
marketing channels
To be able to see how each of your individual
channels (e.g. social media, blogging, email
marketing, SEO, etc.) are performing, you can
easily tie the effect of multiple channels'
performances together
7. 2. People-Centric Data on the Customer
Lifecycle
As you learned earlier, a key differentiator
between web analytics and marketing analytics
is that the latter uses the person not the page
view as the focal point
This enables you to track how your individual
prospects and leads are interacting with your
various marketing initiatives and channels over
time
6Cont…
8. 3. Closed-Loop Data
Perhaps the sexiest function of marketing
analytics is its ability to tie marketing activities
to sales
Sure, your blog may be effective in generating
leads, but are those leads actually turning into
customers and making your business money?
Closed-loop marketing analytics can tell you
The only dependency here is that your
marketing analytics system be hooked up with
your customer relationship management (CRM)
platform such as Salesforce.com, HubSpot
CRM, etc.
7Cont…
9. The future of marketing analytics
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1. Marketing will become more customer-centric:
To become more customer-centric, look internally at your customer relationship management warehouse
or set up a connection between the customer relationship management (CRM) team and your marketing
team
Once you have identified the information you have to work with, it can help you handle the rise of more
personalized targeting
like custom audiences and appropriately emphasize past purchase history to make predictive product
offerings based on past viewing habits
A better understanding of your customer across touchpoints improves outreach, customer acquisition, and
retention
10. 9Cont…
2. Online-to-offline and cross-device attribution will improve:
As smartphones and tablets have now become the dominant devices, the challenge is only increasing
Most digital consumers own at least three connected devices and are always using them, so data
matching for online to offline and across devices will become more popular
To improve attribution, identify your customers across touchpoints to deliver the right offer at the right
time and channel. Omnichannel approaches are the answer to the multidevice consumer
In order to reach your customers (no matter the device they’re using) and continue to engage with them
as they change devices, seek out companies that can match up cross-device or connect offline to online
11. 113. Agile marketing will continue to rise:
Agile marketing will keep growing as investment in big data and analytics increases
Real-time data is becoming the norm, making agile marketing more mainstream
Testing and iterations will have a much shorter turnaround, and marketing departments will have to
become more agile and effective at making data-driven insights
Marketers are moving toward continuous iterations and using platforms and monitoring tools to
analyse results
Marketers can better use their resources and engage with their customers through agile technology,
so staff your team with more analytics professionals
Marketers saw some interesting progress in marketing analytics in 2017, but even more is coming
in 2018. Use data to better understand customer behaviour across multiple devices, implement agile
marketing, and employ the right people to handle the data you have. Then, you’ll be ready to capitalize
on these trends and gain an edge over the competition.
Cont…
13. Analytics companies are revolutionizing the
industry
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1. Alexa:
Alexa, one of the better-known marketing analytics
companies, is responsible for powering the voice
behind Amazon Echo
As more consumers use “her,” she’ll continue to
enhance her vocabulary skills, as well as her attention
to individual preferences and speech patterns
Alexa’s traffic estimates are developed after
examining users’ traffic data in its global data panel
over a period of three months
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2. Jumpshot:
While this analytics start-up might be considered the new kid on the block (it’s been around for just
two years), Jumpshot shouldn’t be underestimated
It not only boasts the largest consumer panel with a whopping 100 million consumers, but that panel is
also the most comprehensive in its industry
The level of detail and depth including insight into HTTPS traffic is unparalleled
“It’s not just our massive user panel that sets Jumpshot apart. It’s what we do with it,” said Deren
Baker, Jumpshot’s CEO
It analyses the clickstream data from each of those 100 million consumers with 40% of that data
coming from mobile devices to provide insights and identify behavioural trends
Cont…
15. 3 Hitwise:
Although Hitwise focuses solely on English-
speaking countries, the analytics company is well-
respected in its industry
Hitwise measures user behaviour across all
platforms, providing data and search trends
This marketing analytics company can improve
anything from search to mobile to email to social
media campaigns through insights from the largest
sample of online behaviour across all devices
Hitwise, a division of Convexity, also enables
users to locate the most visited sites, compare their
web traffic to competitors’, and gauge online market
size
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4. comScore:
Founded in 1999, comScore is a cross-platform
measurement company that measures audience,
consumer, and brand behaviour
Early this year, the company merged with Rentrak
Corporation (also a leader in marketing analytics) to
develop new ways of understanding consumers’
multiscreen behaviours
Recently, NASDAQ discovered the company had
failed to meet compliance concerning delayed
financial reports. Hopefully, once this gets resolved,
the analytics company will be back on track in no time
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17. 5. SimilarWeb:
This company boasts a healthy panel size,
broad geographic coverage, and strong
mobile/app coverage
While it’s a strong data analytics platform,
SimilarWeb pulls data from multiple sources
— this means it takes a long time to publish,
or normalize, said data
Still, SimilarWeb is successful at building a
ranking, every single month, of the largest
American media companies and publishers
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