Utilizing Analytics to Enhance Your Marketing

Any business that’s looking to grow understands the importance of marketing, but not all marketing campaigns are created equal. Marketing costs money, and unless you see a worthwhile return on your investment, those resources are wasted while your business stagnates or begins to see a downturn.

How do you make sure you’re spending your marketing funds wisely? You need reliable, actionable analytics. The more data you have, and the more refined that data is, the easier it is to see who’s engaging with your campaign and who’s buying your products.

Today we’ll go over some essential analytics tips to help your company make the most of its marketing efforts. If you’re interested in learning more about what a savvy, data-driven marketing firm like the Mynt Agency can do to help your business grow, visit our contact page or call one of our three offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, or South Florida.

How Analytics Has Become Much More Precise

The advent of internet advertising has given marketers new tools to gather more detailed data on who is engaging with a company’s marketing and advertising campaigns. And yet, many companies continue to focus on only the most basic, top-level web analytics data these tools can provide. Too many businesses are looking at data like web traffic, unique visitors, bounce rate, etc., when there are much richer tools available at their disposal.

Instead of focusing simply on who’s seeing your marketing campaign materials – which includes basic analytics like traffic and bounce rate – you want to focus on the people who are taking an action after seeing your campaign. Those are the people who are much more likely to purchase your product or service, which is ultimately what you want. These analytics measurements are what’s known as action-oriented analytics.

Here are some of the action-oriented analytics tools you can start using to get better data on your marketing efforts:

• Sessions: A session is the complete set of actions a visitor takes on your website, including page views and answering calls to actions. This is a more complete picture of what people are doing on your website, instead of simply the number of people who happen to look at the page for a split-second before moving on.
• Traffic by device and channel: It’s essential to know how people are reaching the ultimate destination of your marketing campaign, as different businesses and different campaigns have different goals. For example, if you’re trying to get people to download an app, you want to focus on mobile traffic.
• Ratio of new traffic to returning traffic: Being able to tell how many visitors to your website are new visitors versus returning visitors is essential if you want to know how your audience is growing. While it’s important to keep old customers coming back, you also want to be reaching out to new audiences to expand market share.
• Call-to-Action (CTA) Click-Through Rate: This measures the percentage of website visitors who click on a call to action compared with the total number of visitors to a page.
• Submissions: If your website or landing page has a form to fill out, it’s more important to know how many of them are actually filling out the form than how many see it. The submission rate measures the percentage of people who complete a form compared with how many people visited the page.
• Conversion Rate: Whether you’re asking visitors to download an app, sign-up for a service, fill out a form, or any other action, you want to know how many people took that action compared with the total number of visits to your site. CTA click-through rates and submissions rates are both examples of conversion rates, they just measure different kinds of actions.
• Ratio of Generated Leads to Marketing-Qualified Leads: Not every lead you get from a website is necessarily going to pan out. Looking at the ratio of generated leads to marketing-qualified leads gives you more insight into how many leads from your CTA, web form, etc., turn out to be leads that are a good fit for what you’re trying to sell.

While these tools can give you better insight on your web traffic than more basic analytics, it’s not enough to rely solely on your website any longer. You should be marketing across multiple channels, including social media, email marketing, and more.

Using Advanced Analytics to Improve Your Marketing

So, what insights tell you that your marketing campaign is working (or not)? Generally speaking, you want all four of the rates we listed above to be as high as possible. High web traffic numbers are good, as is a high number of social media engagements, but all the traffic in the world doesn’t matter if those visitors aren’t signing up for your service, downloading your app, filling out a contact form, and so on. Attracting visitors to your website or social media platform is relatively easy; getting them to buy something is the hard part, and that’s where quality marketing really makes the difference.

Tracking sales, or leads that turn into sales, is much more valuable than a basic measure of who is seeing your marketing materials. The beauty of these more advanced tools is that you can follow a potential customer’s journey at every step along their path. Here’s how that works in practice:

• You launch a new campaign across multiple channels (social media, email marketing, display ads, etc.), and every platform ultimately funnels to a landing page on your website, where visitors are asked to download your app.
• Someone sees one of your ads on Facebook. Intrigued, they click on the “learn more” button, which redirects them to your website. With these new tools in place, you can see exactly which platform led them to your landing page.
• Now that they’re on your landing page, you can measure how long they spend on the page, see if they end up clicking away to another page, track what actions they take while they’re on the page, and see if they end up downloading your app.
• At the broader level, you can see which customers from which channels are downloading your app, how long the average visitor is spending on your website, what percentage of visitors are downloading the app, and more. That’s much more information than simple web traffic analytics can offer, and it allows you to take direct steps to improve your marketing efforts and target them more effectively.

Having access to this deeper level of analysis gives you much more information on which customers are actually buying your product or service, not just how many people visit your page. Getting people to your webpage isn’t enough; you need to turn those page views into sales, otherwise, you’re wasting your money. With this new information, it’s much easier to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and direct resources accordingly.

Tips for Improving Your Analytics Right Now

To make sure you’re making the most of your marketing efforts, here are some tips for better measuring the data you may already have:

• Look at data across channels: As we previously noted, it’s not enough to have a single-channel marketing campaign anymore. To reach as broad an audience as possible, you need to engage with that audience in as many ways as you can. However, you shouldn’t be sinking money into campaigns that aren’t working. By looking at how traffic, engagement, CTA click-through rates, submissions, and other data points compare across channels, you can see where you’re having your best results, where you can improve, and where to devote future resources.
• Follow your customers as they proceed on their buyer’s journey: Look at where customers are spending the most time in each step along the path to purchasing your product or service. Are they spending time on your social media page, then bailing when it comes time to download your app? That may indicate that you need to change the content of your landing page.
• Determine how many leads are turning into sales: If there’s one thing to take away from everything we’ve said here, it’s that engagement isn’t enough. You need to turn engagement into sales, otherwise, you’re throwing your money away. Find out who’s buying your product and where those customers are coming from, then build from there.

The Mynt Agency Is Here to Help

At the Mynt Agency, we use the latest analytics and marketing technology to help businesses of all sizes grow. We’re up to date with the latest technology and trends, and we offer a wide range of marketing and advertising products. If you’re ready to take your marketing and advertising campaigns to the next level, we’ll help you take the leap. To learn more, visit our contact page or call one of our three offices across the country. We look forward to working with you.