What Are Marketing Analytics Tools?

Marketing analytics tools are software platforms that help marketers understand the health of their marketing campaigns. They may track a variety of key metrics including website traffic, page views, click through rates, or many others in order to inform a marketer of which efforts are working, which aren’t, and why.

Some of these tools may offer focused analysis of individual marketing channels such as email, social media, display, or search advertising, while others may analyze all your marketing data holistically - like DemandJump. The need for different types of marketing analytics tools varies by company and marketing strategy.

In decades past, the success (or failure!) of marketing efforts was much more challenging to determine and rarely happened in real-time. Not so with digital marketing, where you can often gain detailed insight into the outcome of your tactics within a few days or even faster . . . if you have the correct tools available to perform the analysis, that is.

Digital marketing analytics tools can be complex and overwhelming, so much so that marketers tend to select a few simple metrics to track and may not see signals within the noise of all the different trends. Facebook alone has dozens of ways you can fine-tune each type of advertising or post, not to mention all of the additional options available for advertising buys, webpage optimization and other social platforms. Digital marketing analytics tools are meant to help you make better decisions based on which metrics are truly moving the needle for sales or awareness to ensure that your campaign meets your ultimate goals.

Understanding Data-Driven Marketing

The need for digital marketing analytics is growing, with business leadership continually requesting metrics that help quantify the value of your marketing spend. Complex data management platforms (DMPs) are employed to help marketers tunnel through the mounds of data and make the information truly actionable.

With data-driven marketing, marketers are continually looking for the right questions that will help refine their strategies and looking to digital marketing analytics tools to provide the answers. From on-site personalization to targeting and analytics, data plays a massive role in how modern marketers approach their work. With such an emphasis on data and analytics within the marketing realm, it's no surprise that there is a proliferation of tools available that may or may not help marketers make sense of the wealth of data that is now at their fingertips.

Types of Market Analysis Tools

Marketers are often looking for four key types of analytic tools: website, social media, lead generation and ROI. Each of these aspects of your customers and prospects come together to form a cohesive picture of your organization's interaction with various audiences, forming the basis of a data-driven marketing strategy.

Marketing analytics can help you gain insight into cross-channel attribution, campaign tracking and customer segmentation as well as allow you to review your competitors and see whether you are gaining traction against their brands. While they are often mentioned together, it's important for marketers to note that web analytics and marketing analytics form two different pictures of your audiences.

Web Analytics

Web marketing analytics are used to help you understand the relatively limited interactions that your audience is having with your website content. Web analytics in digital marketing are used to determine whether your online message is captivating your audience and causing them to take action, or if they're simply clicking away and heading off your site to visit a competitor. Core web analytics include:

• Page load time
• Page views per visit
• Time on site
• Downloads
• Geographic location of visitors
• New versus returning visitors

In general, website analytics measure the effectiveness of a single channel of communication: your website. There is not enough information here to inform broader business decisions around the effectiveness of your marketing as a whole.

Digital Marketing Analytics

With digital marketing analytics, you are looking at a more holistic picture of your business that is much more user-centric and includes data from multiple locations:

• Email engagement
• Social media interactions
• Online sales and leads
• Offline sales
• Website traffic
• Website events
• Digital advertising
• SEO/SEM

It's difficult to overstate the importance of analytics in digital marketing, particularly when you consider the power of comparing various marketing platforms and the ability to shift your marketing spend to where it drives the greatest results.

Competitor Analysis Tools

Oftentimes, a marketer’s own data alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Many digital marketers today turn to competitor analysis tools to find out what’s happening beyond their four walls. With competitive intelligence tools, marketers can analyze the different sources of website traffic of their competitors - what search terms, social networks, channels, and websites bring qualified visitors to them - in order to understand what they should be doing next.

Digital Marketing Analytics Tools

With all of the data and analytics that are available, pulling them together into a cohesive picture that allows you to make decisions becomes a greater challenge. This is where cross-channel analytics tools become extremely valuable, allowing marketers to visualize and understand the thousands of data points and pull them together into usable data analysis for your marketing strategy. Adjusting your marketing mix by using data analytics tools for digital marketing helps marketers feel more in control, with campaign analytics tools that help enhance their data analysis and marketing strategy.

Making insights actionable is one of the best outcomes of using a marketing analytics solution, which is why organizations of all sizes are turning to DemandJump to gain an edge on their competition. DemandJump removes the guesswork from digital marketing by revealing more of the customer journey and competitive landscape than ever before. For the first time ever, marketers and business leaders alike can see what consumers are doing, what competitors are doing, and what you should be doing next - all in one platform.