You can put all the resources and talented employees you want to work selling a product, but without marketing analytics, it will be impossible to tell if their efforts are paying off. This article defines marketing analytics, looks at why they are so important, and delves into a broad view of how you can use them.

Defining the Term

Companies use marketing analytics to track and optimize their marketing efforts—that is, to see which areas of their marketing efforts are performing well and which are not.

The use of marketing analytics can allow companies to explore many specific traits of a given campaign. For example, the data might reveal that advertisements posted at 11:00 in the morning struggle compared to those posted at 2:00 in the afternoon. It might reveal that Instagram ads are much more likely to draw in potential customers than are Facebook ads, or vice versa.

Getting the Most out of Marketing Analytics

There are several things you should keep in mind to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing analytics. For instance, if the end goal of your marketing efforts is to help your company grow, business expert Neil Patel recommends not focusing on so-called vanity metrics—that is, measurements that superficially look good but don’t actually do much to grow the company. As an example, gaining an extra “like” for your Facebook page is probably less relevant to growth than turning a potential customer into an actual customer.

It’s also important to take a broad view that takes the past into account, provides an accurate look at how present campaigns are performing, and makes predictions about what will succeed or fail in the future. Regarding the past, you can use marketing analytics to identify how certain campaigns performed in relation to each other. Regarding the present, you can identify what your current customers do and don’t respond to. And for the future, you can begin to figure out what type of customer you should target and how to target them.