Analytics has the same importance of marketing activities as any other activity. In its absence, it is impossible to determine whether your business is thriving successfully and what actions to take next. Below are the types of tools used in marketing analytics and its composition summed up for you by Anchante marketing experts.

Analytics and marketing are the main analysis tools that help to measure the productivity of a marketing strategy in the financial aspect. Every advertising activity and marketing initiatives need investment. How is the budget built in efficient companies? Which of the channels was the most effective?

Planning a business process is exclusively related to the dynamics of indicators over the past periods. But not all enterprises are ready to provide their management with effective analytics.

The value of marketing analytics

Marketing analytics is a mechanism for tracking the effect of starting activities and optimizing them. It is used in the study of the influence of marketing on the productivity of an enterprise, controlling the number of sales through advertising, finding out the popularity of the brand, and so on.

Summarizing what has been said, the large–scale goal of marketing analytics is to attract the maximum number of target leads and sales without going beyond the budget. Find the most productive links of pushing and finance them, and bury the unnecessary ones or optimize them. In general, set up the maximum benefit from the promotion costs. Another responsibility of a marketing analyst expert is to make predictions about the results of various activities.

The role of marketing analytics

In the absence of marketing analytics, the firm is afraid to spend long-term funds in communications and tools that do not bring productive results. Or apply creativity that does not attract potential consumers, and push them away in the opposite way.

For example, some time ago one company distributed the marketing budget in equal parts to different channels. As a result, when connecting call analytics and looking more closely, the company's management realized that a separate share of funds simply merged into dead activities.

It is worth giving a small statistic showing the role of analytics in marketing and entrepreneurship in general.

76 percent of marketing experts draw conclusions based on the analysis of indicators

32 percent of marketing experts identified the importance of marketing analytics along with competitive ideas as the most significant in marketing strategies

69 percent of marketing experts concluded that the company should have a personal marketing analytics team

Marketing analytics is the main investment niche of marketers, increasing 16 percent of their annual budget.

Stages and goals of building marketing analytics

• First, you should consider the goals with which analytics is built.
• Designing measurable and explicable indicators by which the productivity of a marketing strategy is assessed.
• Output of final indicators on consumer actions and activation of conversions.
• Summing up the final evaluation of online and offline promotion channels.
• Controlling the position of the company in the market, studying the competitor and its activities.
• Implementation of analysis, projected results and reporting activities of qualitative and quantitative indicators of success.
• Search for a development zone and possible risks in business.
• The design of modernization in progress, as a result of indicators over the past period.

Next, you should list the stages of work of a marketing specialist or an expert analyst that need to be carried out to solve the task. It is clear that this is closely related to the planned scale and ambitions of the business. And in general, their summary is described further.

Creation of key performance indicators and the project of their interrelations.

Approval and division of tasks, the purpose of which is the modernization of a key performance indicator.

• The process of combining data.
• Publication of results.
• Designing recommended actions.
• The embodiment of upgrades to improve the CRI.
• A detailed analysis of the indicators for the past periods is a retrospective.

It is extremely clear that it is forbidden to draw an analogy between marketing analytics in a micro-scale business and ecommerce. Then you can sort out the difference in general at enterprises of different scales.

Small businesses

In such firms, most often the functions of an analyst are performed by a marketer, and sometimes by the owner of the company or business. And this indicator does not mean that in this case there is a chance to exist without a marketing analyst at all. The wrong decision is to believe that its productivity will be useful only in the distant future. If you draw conclusions relying only on intuition, then the business will not be able to develop.

The main task in small business is to clearly understand which activities are productive and increase their scale.

Medium businesses

Similar companies have their own marketer. When the company also has a sales analyst on staff, it will be much easier. Medium-sized businesses have a budget that allows them to connect much more serious tools to facilitate analytics.

And sometimes the owners of medium-sized enterprises make a number of mistakes:

It is believed that analytics should be carried out only by marketers – in addition to personal job responsibilities.

In the presence of an analyst in the company's staff, he is loaded with a lot of additional tasks – competitor analytics, sales analytics, pricing plan.

They miss such a situation when the analysis must be performed constantly and monitor the dynamics indicators – since the market situation is always in motion.

As a result, it turns out that the company's management wants to see a full-fledged department in the format of one specialist in its staff. The tasks of which will converge in addition to analysis, but many other functions.

Therefore, the right decision will be to divide responsibilities among specialists. In addition, to provide these employees with tools that allow detailed marketing analytics.

Large businesses

Enterprises with significant turnover, usually, and significant indicators. And at this time, the analyst gets a large-scale responsibility. Based on this, it is worth building information in a systematic way and visualizing it clearly.

Often, large businesses hire an outsourced analytics specialist who takes part in the creation of difficult dashboards and converts indicators. And the marketing department works closely with him and makes effective joint conclusions.

Huge enterprises are also capable of making mistakes. For example, in the conditions of collecting indicators, they are poorly analyzed, or just superficially. Or a "herd instinct" is created when a company looks up to competitors and introduces something unnecessary.

The difference between reports and adequately structured analytics

The report and analytics are completely different. More precisely, the first is just an element of the second. When a manager or business owner is provided with only reports, he does only one part of his work. It is worth determining the difference.

A report is an approved and standardized type of document with the output of certain data for a specific period, requested from a specialist. For example, there is an option to request a report on the number of leads from contexts for September.

Analysis is a large–scale overview of a given metric. It consists of unusual samples of statistical information for past periods, as well as explanations on what basis this was formed, and tips for optimizing for the future. It is difficult to automate, as it is adjusted to a specific task that needs to be solved in the near future. For example, to analyze what caused the reduction of requests from organics and what activities to carry out in the future. The analysis can also contain a forecast.

Superficially, it seems that the report is for small firms, and the analysis is for larger companies when the staff has its own analyst. In addition, the forecast is easier to implement. In particular, when he owns a small business, there are not many indicators.

Retrospective analytics

A retrospective is an element of the component of all the activities of a marketing specialist. This is where the concept of compiling a report by order of the head is relevant. For example, once a month, a contractor company gives such reports to its customer. In this area of retrospect, the expert compares what result was expected and what it actually turned out to be, and so on.

In short, it is worth considering the construction of an online store analytics. This category varies by scale.

Web-analytical system

Similarly to any type of business, an online store is obliged to analyze the effectiveness of promotion through Google Analytics or the like. When we talk about Google Analytics, the most productive reports are:

• Traffic sources
• Report on advertising companies
• Report on the specified queries
• An indicator of e-commerce and so on

Internet resources usually set up work through telephone requests. Based on this, it is impossible to bypass call tracking in this business. This or a similar service allows you to make a summary of data on the popularity of advertising on the network, which directed a potential client.

A marketing analyst has the opportunity to visit their personal account and track how many calls were received and which source they were received from.

The specialist should focus on these reports:

• The number of missed calls, to conclude conclusions about the negligence of sales department employees;
• Locally on calls from context;
• Statistics on calls made to the so-called callback widgets, of course, when there is one.

Another important information for the analyst about the average time when the maximum number of calls is made, for productive advertising settings.

It is impossible to miss the importance of choosing a flexible service for the analyst to build a convenient job for him. So that the analyst can get a large-scale analysis, and not just a separate selection of some reports.

End-to-end analytics of online store activity

After configuring the systems described above, the Internet resource can use the configuration of end-to-end analytics. When a ready-made tool is used, then it is enough just to integrate this tool. Subsequently, such analytics is able to combine the costs of advertising sources with the revenue from it.

Conclusion

Marketing analytics is a procedure for tracking the effect of running activity and designing plans for their improvement. Through it, they learn the influence of marketing on the success of the enterprise, the number of sales, etc.;

In the absence of marketing analytics, the company acquires the risk of illiterate investment in dead activities;

To build analytics, you should study the main concepts of marketing, understand your goals, and periodically compare with past reports;

Report and analysis are different concepts, in which the first is only an element of the second.

Marketing analytics is a routine, a set of daily tasks that, if wisely solved, can help in lead generation, cost optimization and increasing the number of sales in general.