Increasing ROI with Marketing Analytics
By Zach Emly • April 12, 2022 •
By Zach Emly • April 12, 2022 •
By Zach Emly • April 12, 2022 • News,
Marketing certainly isn’t easy and can turn into a real headache when all your hard work doesn’t generate the results you intended it to. When it comes to marketing, poor analytics can hinder your future results, while properly established analytics can actually help a business increase its ROI.
Marketing analytics help companies make more informed decisions based on user behavior. By leveraging data, a company can create a holistic roadmap of its marketing initiatives. Doing so allows a business to improve its efforts, ultimately enhancing its return on investment.
Let’s discuss how.
Marketing analytics are the eyes and ears of your marketing efforts. Without analytics, you can find yourself lacking results with uncertainty as to why. Analytics play a vital role in helping you identify and improve your marketing and to ensure things are moving in the right direction.
Here’s how your marketing analytics support ROI:
There are many reasons why analytics help generate a positive ROI. The ultimate reason is that it leads to improved marketing practices that generate better results. Data does not only have the singular purpose of helping businesses know how well their marketing campaigns are performing, but it can also show how one can improve their marketing’s ROI.
Every business wants to improve their ROI, but it’s not something that just happens without a strategy. Organizations must be strategic in how they operate in order to create positive results. Just having analytics won’t necessarily help a business increase its ROI. Doing so requires certain steps.
1. Ensure Proper Installation and Setup of Analytics
It may sound obvious to some, but some organizations either don’t have analytics at all, or their analytics are poorly set up. When reviewing analytics with businesses, we often find that their analytics are broken or only tracking partial data. Oftentimes their data is scattered across multiple systems and is difficult for a business to understand. This is why proper setup is vital.
Helpful Article: How to set up Google analytics for a website or app
2. Make sure you have the ability to understand the data
For many, analytics and marketing terms are like a foreign language. It doesn’t matter what software you utilize or what items you are able to track if you don’t understand the information that’s being presented. In order for your organization to leverage the analytics, you have to understand what they mean.
For a deep dive into Google Analytics check out the Analytics Academy
3. Set Benchmarks
Once your analytics are properly established, you will want to create benchmark reports that note where your marketing efforts stand at the moment. This allows you to understand if a campaign was successful or not, while also allowing you to track how well your business is doing. Many businesses are affected by seasonal trends in their business, so tracking specific seasons over time may provide better insights than tracking month to month. Either way, setting benchmarks before trying something new will unlock insights that can be used to improve future campaigns.
You can learn more about benchmarking here
4. Create goals
A useful aspect of tracking analytics is that it gives the ability to create SMART goals. A smart goal is a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Instead of creating goals for the sake of setting goals, SMART goals provide a sense of direction that helps businesses reach their goals more assuredly. This is an important step in improving your ROI because it is essentially allowing you to set the target with the proper direction to hit it.
You want to make sure to set company-wide goals, but you can also set marketing goals using Google Analytics by following these directions.
5. Create an action plan and put it into motion
Data does your business no good if your business never utilizes it to make changes. Once you know where your marketing stands, and you’ve set goals, your business can use that same data to create an action plan. Experimenting and taking action from your analytics is crucial to getting better results because without change there is no progress.
6. Track individual campaigns
Analytic tools like Google Analytics will provide you with an overview of your marketing. However, it’s important once you start implementing different marketing tactics that you track each one individually (ensuring proper installation will aid in this). This allows a business to identify which campaigns are working and which aren’t. It also gives behavioral insights into what is attractive to users. If you don’t track each campaign you won’t know which tactics are causing increases and which are bringing your ROI down.
If you want to know how to collect campaign data and track campaigns this article will help
7. Reassess the data
Unfortunately, marketing is rarely a “set it and forget it” effort. There’s a reason an organization’s marketing efforts are considered their marketing journey. Marketing is never perfected but rather tweaked and improved again and again. Because of this, businesses should regularly assess their data. Especially during and after a marketing campaign. By continually reassessing data, you gain insights into whether or not campaigns are trending in the right direction or if adjustments need to be made.
8. Make changes accordingly
As you track and assess your marketing efforts, you may need to course-correct based on what you uncover. For instance, you might find that marketing channel A lacks results month after month or in some cases year after year. It may be time to adjust what happens on that channel or get rid of it all together. You could also find that a certain advertising channel is generating a very high ROI. This could be an indicator that you want to invest more in this area. By getting rid of the items pulling your ROI down and investing in those with a high ROI, your overall ROI has the potential to skyrocket.
Analytics can be hard to understand and even harder to get actionable data from it.
Many companies have some type of analytics software to track their marketing efforts, however, they’re simply not getting the most out of that data. They have the data but they either don't know what to look at or know how to utilize it in the best way possible. Most businesses either give up or are too busy to take the time to understand. But what we’ve learned is that in order to get the most out of our marketing efforts we must understand how to use the data we are collecting.
Tips for utilizing your data:
It’s not until we get a solid handle on our analytics that we are able to unlock the potential ROI of marketing with analytics. Once an organization truly understands what’s going on with its marketing, it’ll have the ability to get its marketing efforts focused in the right direction.
Check out The MOJO SEO Portal: our key to simplifying marketing analytics
