Marketing Analytics Software Buyers Guide
Last updated: October 01, 2023
The processes and technologies allow marketing teams to draw evaluations to measure the success and value of their marketing efforts. This is done by several methods including measuring performance rates of different campaigns across different channels and sources against each other such as adverts vs social media vs blog. Marketing analytics gathers and uses important business metrics, such as marketing attribution, ROI, and overall marketing impact. In simpler words, this software tells users how their marketing programs are performing.
In this guide, we will touch on the basic topics relating to Marketing Analytics software to help potential users identify the use, features, and benefits of the product.
What is a Marketing Analytics software?
Marketing analytics software is designed to collect data from across all marketing channels and consolidate it into a single marketing view. From this common view, users are able to extract analytical results that offer invaluable assistance in driving the business marketing efforts in the right direction. Determining the value of marketing initiatives would be a complicated and cumbersome task without marketing analytics. Marketing analytics platforms encompass of a variety of applications including marketing automation, business intelligence, social media marketing, and mobile marketing solutions, each one with its strength on a specific scenario. Using these tools, marketing analytics considers all marketing efforts across all channels over a span of time, helping businesses with sound decision-making and effective, efficient program execution. They also provide detailed insights about customers to convert more sales leads. This data may include customer preference, patterns, behavior, history and more are analyzed to provide insights so marketing campaigns can be tweaked to pinpoint effective marketing methods and information-driven decisions can be drawn.
Marketing analytics systems are generally cloud-based. They also offer robust integration with major customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and with other Web analytics services, such as Google Analytics.
Google Analytics
Common Features and Capabilities
Forecasting & Optimization
Predictive analytics tools use past datasets to predict and optimize future outcomes and learn their ROI.
Customer Analytics & Segmentation
Campaigns are built by assessing the customer journey extracted from customer data, segmentation, and web analytics.
Dashboard
Automate and provide multi-sourced reporting to decision-makers across the organization for accessible and actionable data & insights.
Competitive Analysis
Focuses on rival brands activities and monitors their marketing performance in comparison to yours.
Data Visualization
Marketing analytics are applied to yield a visualized view to interpret and exhibit data that makes it easy to understand insights and other important analytics reports.
Purchase Intent Analysis
identifies online behaviors and actions that are most likely to lead to any online or offline purchase.
Attribution Modeling
It is a functional component that uses statistical regression techniques to deduce and quantify which element in a previous campaign or channel resulted in customer conversion in the past.
Testing & Personalization
Advanced tools to test different content on different audiences and personalize digital experiences.
How is Marketing Analytics different from Web Analytics?
Web analytics pinpoint and amplify the elements in the customer journey, addressing questions like how potential customers or site visitors interact with particular elements in your marketing campaign or website. Interactions can be in the form of page views, time spent on a page, unique page views, number of hits on a page, load time, time-on-site and bounce rate or click-through rate which give you an idea on customer/visitor behavior. Web analytics focuses on the data that comes from website tracking and a customer's general presence online. However, they are all not enough to measure the success of marketing performance. Web analytics is very helpful but do not give users a complete picture of how the marketing efforts will pan out.
Marketing analytics deals with the big picture. It uses different marketing analytics techniques including marketing campaigns and activities, multichannel attribution, marketing mix modeling, distribution of marketing efforts to monitor their effectivity and discover ROI. It also helps identify current trends and analyze customer preference. It offers assistance with advertising sense, search engine optimization, and optimization of advertisements.
In essence, Marketing analytics is customer-centric and puts more emphasis on the prospect, lead or customer while web analytics’ focus factor is the page view.
Benefits of Marketing Analytics
Studies suggest that companies that introduce advancements in estimations and ROI capacities are bound to exceed competitors and have a larger amount of effectivity and productivity in their marketing initiatives. Marketing Analytics software provides the instant edge that keeps businesses ahead in the modern digital marketing space and information-driven the business environment. Some of the major benefits it offers are:
- Allows a holistic view of marketing trends
- Users can gain a full view of customers across channels
- Helps identify which campaigns are successful and why
- Anticipates customer and market behavior and respond proactively
- Understand the ROI of each program thoroughly
- Enables users to personalize marketing and customer engagements
- Tools to optimize social media strategies and visualize analytical data across the enterprise
- Forecast and boost results
Other Considerations
When looking for new analytics software to reinforce your marketing activities, here are some important things to consider:
Ease of use: It is crucial to address the question of how adaptable the system will be for employees to learn and use. You can peruse surveys and reviews of various products on several platforms to get an idea of how difficult it will be to train the staff. You can likewise demo potential software to get a feeling of which one will be the least complicated to utilize.
Scalability: Another important consideration if you plan to extend your marketing endeavors across more channels as your business develops, is the scalability of the software you employ. You will need a flexible and feature-rich platform that offers a large variety of capabilities. This way, the software can develop with you. Cloud-based platforms are ideal for this purpose as adding new clients or extra applications is normally a simple procedure with them.
Pricing: Every new acquisition or upgrade starts with you deciding how much you’re willing to pay for it. Most analytics tools are membership-based and are generally estimated by business size. For small businesses, it is a huge benefit as these platforms scale with them as they grow, and are often very affordable for small numbers of users.
