The Shortest Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Analytics

He who controls information controls the world
-Dr. Stephen Franklin of Babylon 5

 A completely fictional character from a far-future space saga said this phrase based on the quotes of the best minds in human history. Data is all around us: it’s a mix of both extremely important and totally irrelevant bits and pieces. The success of our work as marketers directly depends on our ability to find, accumulate, and use the data we have access to. Let’s see what it means. 

What is meant by marketing analytics?

Marketing analytics is a process—a constant lookout for patterns and trends in your data, so you can draw conclusions and source ideas for your future marketing activities. By applying logic and technology, you should be able to understand consumers better, increase your ROI, and refine your approach to marketing altogether.

Sources of data for marketing analytics

First-party data always comes first in terms of quality and use for your business. It is gathered directly from your users by… you. Analytics based on first-party data slay on multiple levels: the data your users share with you willingly is free and highly reliable.

Second-party data is shared by another organization. This makes it first-party data for them and second-party data for their partner companies. It comes in handy when two companies' audience types have similar demographics or when they are running a promotion together.

Third-party data is data that’s been gathered in large volumes and sold by organizations that don’t have a connection to you. Although a sometimes useful source of data on general patterns and lookalike audiences, third-party remains less reliable than the first two.

A combination of first-party and third-party cookies might be the key to the “bigger picture.” For example, working with this data combo, Meta Pixel measures the effectiveness of advertising campaigns across the whole Meta ecosystem and tracks user actions on your website.

Why is marketing analytics crucial for business?

There’s no news here—the goals of every business action must align with the goals of every business: lower expenses, higher revenue.

To get closer to both of these goals, marketers must use all of their analytical skills to understand why the customer or user made a purchase, how they found the product, and how both of those scenarios can be successfully replicated for a larger audience. 

As a talented marketer, you can also extrapolate this success and find new sources of customers and new reasons for them to buy the product. Here’s how marketing analytics benefits the marketer and the business in general.

Understand the customer journey

How do you use marketing analytics to understand your customer's path to purchase? First, collect customer data from online and offline interactions, managing it in CRMs and analytics tools. Then, merge this data to create defined profiles (personas), understanding their preferences.

With time, you’ll learn how to use advanced analytics to spot trends and patterns. Apply your newly found insight to improve your website, optimize processes, and enhance customer engagement.

Improve the user experience

How comfortable are your customers with using your platform? First, gather data on their interactions with your website or app. Then, analyze the data (learnability, efficiency, recovery from errors) to find common pain points for users.

Create user profiles to understand their preferences and behaviors. Use these insights to improve website navigation and simplify signup and payment processes.

Personalize outreach

Personalized content works better. Collect detailed customer data from various touchpoints and analyze this data to identify individual preferences and behaviors. Create detailed customer profiles so you can use these insights to personalize your marketing messages, recommend relevant products, and send offers.

This targeted approach increases conversion rates by meeting every customer’s unique needs. Tools for creating the customer persona and theories on the customer journey are also available.

Measure ROI

This marketing analytics application is crucial for businesses because it collects data on all marketing activities and their costs. Track conversions, sales, and other KPIs linked to each campaign. Use analytics tools to compare these outcomes against your expenditures.

Calculate the return on investment (ROI) by determining the revenue generated versus the costs incurred. This is the way to find and push the most effective strategies, save your budget, and present your work to stakeholders.

Stay goal-oriented

Set clear, measurable goals for your marketing campaigns and monitor your progress with KPIs. Use analytics tools to track performance metrics and keep your eyes on the prize. Either regularly review and adjust your strategies based on data insights or invest in an advanced marketing automation tool.

Refine your strategy and predict the success of future campaigns

What worked and what didn’t? Tracking your success translated into numbers will help you refine your marketing strategies. Foretell the success of future campaigns by leveraging predictive analytics, which can forecast outcomes based on historical data. Keep polishing your approach, and one day you’ll be one step ahead of market trends.

What are the types of marketing analytics?

There are a few types of marketing analytics that are used most often. Meaning, they are literally crucial to any business having an online presence.

Web analytics

Web analytics examines metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates. Marketers can use this type of analysis to identify trends and optimize their websites for better performance. It helps them understand what content actually works, build better navigation, and rule over visitor engagement. 

Social media analytics

Social media analytics sources and analyzes data from social media platforms, so you'll see the direct results of the social media presence.

That includes KPIs of audience engagement and the overall effect of social media campaigns: likes, shares, comments, and follower growth. Looking into social media analytics will hopefully help you adjust the content strategy and improve targeting.

Paid advertising analytics

Paid advertising analytics tracks the effect of your advertising on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, and all the other “Ads.” It tracks conversion KPIs such as click-through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS).

By analyzing these metrics, marketers can witness the quality of their ad spend, identify high-performing campaigns, and adjust their strategies to maximize ROI.

SEO analytics

SEO analytics result in the most accurate example of entropy. To get a higher ranking on search engines (who are we kidding, there’s only one left), marketers are trying to include more keywords in every content piece.

Lucky for us, Google announced an update in March 2024. So we’ll see what happens with keyword rankings, organic traffic, bounce rates, and backlink profiles.

Email marketing analytics

It’s a long-existing way to get to your target audience, but now it does not exploit crows.  Email marketing analytics are all about the performance of email campaigns.

Key metrics include open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates. Mailchimp has a good tool for benchmarking your email analytics against those of your industry competitors.

Marketing analytics maturity model 

You used your sources right, and now you have all of this data going back months and even years. There’s a marketing analytics model in which all three categories of analytics are sorted out in the most reasonable order - chronologically.

In short, descriptive analytics covers the existing information on user behavior, predictive analytics interprets this information to create theories for the near future, and prescriptive analytics advises on what to do if the predictive analytics are correct. 

Example: You sell orange juicers, and your descriptive analytics tell you your sales in Florida are peaking from December to May. You know your business, so you realize the demand is related to the citrus season, and you can expect this spike every year. 

The predictive analytics might tell you that users who like the Florida University page visited your site a lot in October. And there you go—a new target audience of Florida Uni alumni who are gathering for the homecoming week and want to take advantage of early oranges. 

This is the moment where prescriptive analytics will suggest you put a promo on your expensive travel-size juicer.

Descriptive analytics: What happened?

Open your history books, now close them, and now open your analytics dashboard. This is the main source of information you have on your user location, demographics, customer journey, and behavioral patterns. All of those are clear, specific, and verifiable insights and KPIs. With those at hand, you can make informed decisions with confidence. 

Sourcing insights from your analytics dashboard, though simple and cost-effective, remains the foundation of effective business strategy.

Predictive analytics: What’s next?

At this stage, you pass on your descriptive analytics results to a professional tool that can analyze large volumes of data and make increasingly accurate predictions. While the whole process can be done manually (as it was before powerful algorithms came), automation is much more efficient. 

For instance, predictive analytics can answer the question of how increasing your budget for a well-performing Facebook campaign might affect the quality of the traffic and your ROI.  

Prescriptive analytics: How can you prepare for whatever comes next?  

Prescriptive marketing analytics goes over your past data and recommends the most effective 20% of actions to achieve the desired 80% of outcomes (Pareto principle). 

Like, when new perspective audiences are found, prescriptive analytics will determine the best methods to target them. Prescriptive analytics are part of marketing automation. 

The 5 best marketing analytics tools

Here are the top five marketing analytics tools most experienced marketers use to gather their analytics. There’s one for the emails, one for SEO, one for the website, one to build and share reports, and the one tool we like best. 

1. Madgicx’s One-Click Report

First up is the One-Click Report, which helps you analyze and optimize your ads across the most popular social media platforms. It pulls all your data into easy-to-read reports, so you can quickly tweak your campaigns as needed.

What’s cool is that the One-Click Report comes with 19 pre-made templates that cover every combination of Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, TikTok, GA4, and Shopify analytics. You can customize these templates easily, share them internally or with clients, and even create reports from scratch.

The best part? It starts at just $29 per month for 5 reports, and you can try it free for 7 days.

Best Feature: Cross-channel analytics that delivers holistic insights from all your marketing efforts.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool that tracks website traffic from various sources and organizes it into neat reports. Users can also build custom reports for very specific analytics.

Best Feature: Real-time data tracking, which allows marketers to monitor and respond to user activity as it happens.

3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp specializes in email marketing and provides detailed reports on email campaign performance analytics, including open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber engagement.

Best Feature: Advanced segmentation and A/B testing.

4. Looker Studio

Looker Studio lets you collaborate with your team on reports and dashboards. It also helps you send data and insights to stakeholders automatically.

The Looker Studio itself is free, but if you want to analyze data coming outside of Google's products, you might need to use services like Supermetrics or manually transfer your marketing data to Google Sheets.

Best Feature: Interactive dashboards that turn data into a suspense story happening in real time. 

5. Semrush

Of course, there’s Semrush. This SEO analytics superstar provides competitive analysis, keyword resarch, and backlink tracking to enhance your online strategy.

Best Feature: You can get a free SEO report for your site that lists all of the important metrics.

Conclusion

In this post, we have discussed the value marketing analytics tools bring to the business. We have also looked into the most popular analytics tools for various types of data and the types of data we can gather with them.

We have traced some theories regarding the types of marketing analytics and saw how a practical approach to data makes you a highly skilled fortune teller, charming the stakeholders with your marketing analytics results.