Tag Archive for: Marketing Analytics

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Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

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Get the Most Out of Your AnalyticsWhat exactly are marketing analytics and why are they so important? First of all, marketing analytics help to put accountable numbers behind your marketing programs. By monitoring the right numbers, you can maximize ROI and ensure your marketing efforts are producing the greatest response. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most out of your analytics through applying the data to future marketing plans.

Traditionally, marketers are seen as the creative types that focus on sculpting an impactful message to drive prospect response. Recently, we’ve seen marketing analytics creep more and more into the marketers’ day-to-day routine. Why is this? Mostly this is because numbers are easily trackable and provide a means for interpreting how prospects interact with your business. Read more about bringing an analytical culture into your marketing practices here.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

 

Integrate analytics into the rest of the marketing plan.

Utilize marketing automation to track your web visitors’ activity. The data from those reports will show you which landing pages are the most effective and which CTAs your prospects are following. The tracking software will enable marketers to effortlessly integrate analytics into their daily routine and follow up with prospects, understanding where everyone stands in the funnel. A successful integration should reinforce your sales and marketing alignment. Use your marketing analytics to turn your sales funnel into data.

Interpret the data.

So now you’ve got all of this data, how will you interpret it to get the most out of your analytics? You’ll see better ROI when you’re able to more personally connect with your prospects, so a thorough understanding of their activity and interaction with your brand will help marketers get their point across effectively. Interpreting the data will also aid in sales and marketing alignment in that you’ll be able to refine your funnel, maximize the CTAs that work and cut the attempts that aren’t as fruitful. It is important to prune your data—don’t waste time analyzing data that isn’t showing results or giving actionable items.

Review regularly.

Checking the stats once a year won’t create as much of an impact and certainly won’t help you to get the most out of your analytics. Make checking the numbers regularly a habit—have the data available for monthly or quarterly marketing meetings when the whole team is present so that everyone’s on the same page. Lead Liaison has a solution for keeping an eye on visitor behavior and enables you to gather information and metrics as they happen.

Incorporating these simple steps into marketers’ day-to-day will ultimately aid in gauging new marketing initiatives. You’ll be able to monitor unique visits as well as track return visitors to keep an eye on their buying interest and ensure they are qualified appropriately. Tracking the referring sites of your visitors will also help to point out potential marketing partnerships. Use this fact-based decision-making in order to get the most out of your analytics and ultimately the most out of your current marketing practices.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Metrics to Focus On

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While marketing automation can improve marketing and sales performance, companies are sometimes unsure of which metrics to focus on. Marketing automation platforms typically provide analytics that can be used as key performance indicators. In most cases, the marketing automation metrics that are often used as KPIs are similar to traditional metrics. Marketing Automation Metrics

Marketing Source Pipeline

Marketing source pipeline refers to how effectively each channel is at lead generation. Marketing automation analytics reveal where leads are being generated. Within a multi-channel marketing program there may be several lead generation campaigns: email, SEM, social, etc. deployed at one time. Using MA, marketing execs should evaluate which sources are pulling leads into their sales pipelines. Evaluate each source’s contribution within a program at leads’ point-of-entry into the pipeline.

Marketing Influenced Pipeline

Sometimes called “channel effectiveness”, the marketing influenced pipeline is a measurement of how effectively MA practices are escalating messages and advancing leads through the sales pipeline. It is important to understand how effectively automated marketing campaigns are performing at lead management. Which messages are engaging and advancing leads? Whether the metric being analyzed relates to day-parting effectiveness or channel performance, executives should understand how effectively marketing is at funnel progression. Evaluate the performance of lead nurturing practices by measuring marketing-qualified leads (MQL), sales-accepted leads (SAL), and sales-qualified leads (SQL).

Investment-to-Pipeline

How effectively is digital marketing spend turning prospects into leads? Companies may have different definitions for a new lead, MQL, SAL, or SQL but execs should be focused on how well marketing dollars are filling the pipeline. Lead abandonment rates can be used to evaluate where leads are dropping off. And it can be beneficial to examine the dollars spent to achieve each status within the sales pipeline.

Investment-to-Revenue

This is the big one that most marketing execs are graded on in both traditional marketing practices and marketing automation practices. Often called the “win rate”,  this metric reveals how well marketing spend is driving sales. It can be tricky to evaluate profit within an MA platform but execs should definitely be focused on where marketing dollars are producing revenue. While cost-per-lead and close rate are frequently used as KPIs, as MA analytics evolve further, marketing execs will be able to sharpen their focus on evaluating the practices that are directly influenced by marketing automation.

Lead Liaison

B2B Marketing Analytics: Metrics to Focus On (Part 4)

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B2B Marketing Analytics: Metrics to Focus On (Part 4)In this post we continue the discussion about analyzing your B2B marketing analytics. As we mentioned in Metrics to Focus On (Part 3), your B2B marketing strategy should be analyzed for each marketing practice you employ. These days marketing automation platforms are available that provide executives with granular views of how effective their marketing activities have been. Here are a few key metrics that should be analyzed for your PPC and email marketing practices.

Pay-Per-Click

Click-through rate (CTR)

On the surface this metric is pretty obvious but, in this case, we recommend going beyond counting how many clicks resulted from each marketing asset. Focus on the resulting activity. What occurred after the link was clicked? Did your lead bounce from your landing page? Analyzing the activity after you earned the click reveals messaging effectiveness and indicates whether leads are being advanced through the marketing pipeline.

Cost per click (CPC)

Certainly, “how many sales resulted from our PPC campaign?” is an important question but there are additional metrics that can also be measured from a paid campaign. For example, one way to fully capture the ROI is to calculate how many repeat sales resulted following an initial paid click. Did a PPC buyer return to buy again? Consider returns other than financial ones from your CTR; metrics such as new email subscribers from a paid campaign may be worth analyzing as well.

Landing page

They’ve clicked your ad and viewed your landing page. What happens next? If a click-through bounces quickly from a landing page, for instance, it can be a good indicator of the ad’s messaging effectiveness. As mentioned before, measuring activity following a paid click is important. In this case, look at your landing page conversion rate as a ratio against your CTR – that can tell you whether sales are resulting from ads or your landing pages.

Email

Click-through rate

Our view for this metric is the same as for PPC assets: look beyond the number of click-throughs and examine what happened after the click. Analytics tools can evaluate email ROI so you can determine how effective your email messaging is at converting sales. Remember to look beyond financial returns. For example, measuring the number of leads that have shared an email after clicking embedded links can reveal message effectiveness and brand advocacy, and contribute to better lead profiling.

Subscribers

It is important to evaluate your subscriber base for patterns and trends. Segment email subscribers by title, industry, or budget to evaluate what lead profiles are interested in your messages and where messaging can be improved. Don’t forget that your subscriber base can provide an opportunity to expand your reach through message sharing or forwarding.

Sharing/Forwarding

Whether an email asset is shared through an embedded Twitter button or via traditional forwarding this activity, which is recognized as being social in nature, should be analyzed to evaluate message effectiveness and develop lead profiles. Which method was used to share your message? How often are recipients sharing your email messages? Examine which messages are being shared and who is sharing messages to get a feel for how effective your email campaigns are at developing brand advocates.

For more solutions that will improve your marketing ROI contact a Lead Liaison representative today – and look for more great sales and marketing ideas in our revenue generation blog.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Analytics: Turning Your Sales Funnels Into Data

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Marketing Analytics Sales FunnelRegardless of the size of your business, you probably have an idea of what your sales funnel looks like. Just in case you’re green on all this, your sales funnel refers to the process a customer goes through before buying from you. This process spans the time at which they become a lead through their (sometimes long) decision-making process, right up until the moment the sale happens. In most cases, a sale doesn’t mean the buyer is out of your funnel. Once customers buy there’s always the chance they can become repeat customers – thus, once in your funnel, customers are almost always in there. Sound marketing analytics can give you some idea of what stages of your funnel a typical customer is in and for how long.

Many business owners give the side-eye to the thought of truly sitting down to look at their marketing analytics. There are a variety of reasons for this – one could be lack of ability to interpret the data. Another could be the lack of easy tools one can use to track and interpret the data, as well as integrate it into the rest of your marketing plan.

Marketing Analytics Help You Make Decisions

The truth is, if you’re not digging into your marketing analytics to help you inform future directions for your business, you’re missing a hotbed of potential for new decisions and creativity in your business. Here are some examples:

Setting up Goals: Google Analytics allows you to set up Goals in your Analytics install. Goals can be used to track the actions users take on your site. For instance, if you want to see how often users who come to a certain page will click through a sequence of pages before filling out a form, Goals can track that. If you’d like to see how many users from Facebook are taking a certain action on your site, Goals can help you. Goals are a great way to set up and take full advantage of marketing analytics based on your funnel.

  1. You can learn more about setting up Goals at: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1032415 or watching some helpful videos such as
  2. Melinda Samson’s Setting Up and Using Analytics Goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDNkXdOuhBc
  3. John Duffy’s Advanced Use of Analytics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijniFqC3PaM

Refining Your Funnel: Your sales data might actually show you that your funnel needs work. Are you overestimating the amount of time it takes for a client to decide they should use your services? Data will corroborate these kinds of hunches.

Marketing Analytics: Putting it all in the Cloud

Every organization should be watching to see how Marketing Analytics shows customers behaving on and using their site. You should be including data from your Marketing Analytics tools in your lead management system to give you detailed info about your leads. What is your typical lead conversion time? Where do the most highly converted leads come from? Are you truly getting the best ROI out of your marketing?

Lead Liaison is a system that can integrate marketing analytics and lead data to show you if your marketing decisions are helping you make the most out of your leads. It’s time to take a tour and ensure marketing analytics informs your business decisions today.

Lead Liaison

B2B Marketing Analytics: Metrics to Focus On (Part 2)

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B2B Marketing Analytics Blog and SEOAs we mentioned in Metrics to Focus On (Part 1), effective B2B management requires you to focus on your b2b marketing analytics. Available analytics tools within lead generation and marketing automation platform provide impressive granularity that allows you to modify and improve your strategies. Here are key metrics to analyze for your blog and SEO practices.

Blog

Referral sources

Who is sending traffic your way? Sure, it’s great to get attention from third-party referrers but it can be even more beneficial when you understand who they are. What is their business? Who is their audience? The quality of your referral sources can directly affect readership and, consequently, revenue generation. Take the time to know your referral sources – it can lead to higher revenues.

Subscribers

A blog can be an effective inbound marketing asset when used as a lead nurturing tool. The sign of a productive lead nurturing tool is the number of followers who engage repeatedly with your brand. What is your number of subscriptions, sign up rate, and number of times a subscriber visits? Analyze the composition of your audience to determine targeted marketing opportunities.

Engagement

Automated marketing developers like our talented Lead Liaison team are finding ways to get deeper inside your market. Mining comment streams for data is a fairly new analytics tool that allows you to understand the tone, depth, and frequency of conversations via social sites, review sites, and others.
You can select keywords and phrases relevant to your business to analyze how the market is reacting to your blog posts.

SEO

Keyword performance

The keywords used in your site and marketing assets can make a significant impact on the effectiveness of your online presence. How productive are they? There are a number of tools available to analyze page ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. according to the keywords and phrases you embed. Bear in mind that your keywords shouldn’t remain static; therefore, updating keywords to match traffic trends based on keyword performance analytics can be useful to managing your business.

Search rankings

How visible is your domain? Are your videos, articles, and other marketing assets reaching the first page? If your web pages are not being indexed effectively it can kill your conversion rates. Search engine optimization rules change regularly so analyze how well your marketing assets are currently being ranked. There are tools that deploy spider technology to analyze each page of your online presence for rank across multiple engines.

Inbound links

If you deploy multiple inbound assets such as social media, press releases, or product reviews, you’re probably using trackable links that connect your audience with landing pages or your website. Analyze the performance of these links as part of a marketing effectiveness evaluation. Tools like Google Analytics allow you to review which links are productive across search engines, referral sites, and other traffic generators.

The next post in this series will discuss the metrics you should analyze from your social media and content marketing practices.

Lead Liaison

B2B Marketing Analytics: Metrics to Focus On (Part 1)

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B2B Marketing AnalyticsB2B marketing analtyics and metrics to focus on, Part 1. Effective B2B lead management demands consistent analysis. There is no shortage of b2b marketing analytics reporting programs available, thereby there is no excuse to avoid reviewing your lead generation practices. A monthly or quarterly review can provide you with vital information which helps to determine marketing ROI. The first place to start is your website – the hub of your online marketing practices. There are seven key areas related to website traffic that should be included in your analysis.

Unique visitors

Analyze new exposures to your website. Unique views can shed light on the effectiveness of new marketing campaigns as well as your site’s position within organic search rankings. Cookies provide a mechanism which allows you to identify new and returning visitors. And a tracking application like our desktop client Streamer™ captures and displays unique IP addresses so you can view who is on your site and how long they are visiting.

Returning visitors

Users who return to your site may indicate greater interest in your solutions. It is important to analyze what pages a returning visitor is viewing and the duration of the return visit. This should tell you a bit about the purpose for the follow up visit. New page view metrics by returning visitors provide a good opportunity for a qualifying sales engagement.

Popular pages

Which pages are being viewed most often? If your product pages are getting the most hits, chances are there is interest from genuine prospects. Compare each page within your site’s architecture to determine if your visitors are onsite to learn about the company or to investigate your solutions.

Traffic source

Knowing how your visitors are finding you reveals specific strengths and weaknesses of your campaigns. Is your content marketing strategy effective in driving site traffic or is your search engine marketing strategy the key to bringing visitors? The source of your site traffic is an important identifier for two reasons: 1) it reveals what led a prospect to your site and 2) it helps determine the ROI of paid campaigns.

Referring websites

Google Analytics and other traffic analyzers reveal what sites your prospects are visiting prior to finding you. Not only does this reveal the research patterns of your prospects but what sites may make valuable marketing partners. Keep in mind that the more popular a referring site is, the higher ranking your site will receive.

Bounce rates

How long are your pages being viewed? Which pages are getting bounced more often or faster than others? The length of time a visitor remains on a page tells you a lot about the value of that page. If the bounce rate for a specific page is high analyze the page to determine if the content on the page is providing value to your visitors.

CTA performance

Analyze your landing page response rates. Are marketing assets driving traffic to your landing pages? Just as important: are your landing pages generating an adequate response rate from calls-to-action? Marketing experts indicate a 1-3% conversion rate is average response rate, a 3-5% rate is decent, and over 5% means you’re doing something right.

Our the next post in this series we will discuss the metrics you should analyze from your blogs and SEO practices.