Marketing and Analytics

Marketing Analytics: What is it?

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). It allows marketers to be more efficient at their jobs and minimize wasted Web marketing dollars. 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.”

The Importance Of Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics, Internet (or Web) marketing analytics in particular, allows you to monitor campaigns and their respective outcomes, enabling you to spend each dollar as effectively as possible. The importance of marketing analyics 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. In search marketing in particular, knowledge comes in the form of keywords, because they tell you exactly what was on the mind of your current and potential customers at any point in time. In fact, the most valuable long-term benefit of engaging in paid and natural search marketing isn’t incremental traffic to your website, it’s the keyword data contained within the click which can be utliized to inform and optimize other business processes.

  • Product Design: Keywords can reveal exactly what features or solutions your customers are looking for.
  • Customer Surveys: By examining keyword frequency data you can infer the relative priorities of competing interests.
  • Industry Trends: By monitoring the relative change in keyword frequencies you can identify and predict trends in customer behavior.
  • Customer Support: Understand where customers are struggling the most and how support resources should be deployed.