Understanding Marketing Analytics and Web Analytics

All too often the marketing terms ‘marketing analytics’ and ‘web analytics’ are thrown around as if they are one in the same. The truth is, there is a huge difference between the two and both are integral to your overall marketing success. You really can’t have one without the other, although they are not one in the same.

What Is The Difference Between Web and Marketing Analytics?

Google Analytics has gotten everyone thinking that ‘analytics’ simply translates to the number of hits a site gets, the amount of time visitors spend on a site, and bounce rates. Yet, that’s far from all you need to know in order to formulate successful marketing strategies. Google Analytics best describes web analytics, which is still very useful but only looks at a part of the overall picture.

Web analytics involves analyzing the data results from website tracking and your general presence online. Such as, how visitors interact with your website, as well the hype surrounding your online presence. This is all very useful information, but there are so many other forces at work that are interconnected with your website and overall marketing success. This is where marketing analytics comes in handy.

Marketing analytics deals with a much larger base of data, including all of the data associated with web analytics. Marketing analytics takes a look at the data from all forms of marketing currently employed in order to provide a much broader, and clearer picture than web analytics is capable of. Since marketing analytics includes data from all channels being put to use, you receive an incredibly clear picture of which efforts are paying off and which are wasting money.

The Importance Of Web Analytics

Web Analytics is necessary in order to fully understand the effectiveness of your digital marketing techniques. The overall layout of your website, including content, subscribe buttons, and interactive features will either prove effective or defective. This gives you the chance to almost instantly change anything that doesn’t work about your site.

Knowing things like: the number of people that click to your site, where your traffic comes from, how many pages they view, and if they make a purchase or not gives you the power to create a site your target audience literally loves. When you launch a new campaign or make changes, web analytics help determine how these changes actually impact your conversion rates.

There are two different forms of web analytics including off-line and on-line.

Off-line web analytics relates to your presence on the web regardless if you operate an official website or not. How many people are talking about your business via social media or Yahoo reviews? Off-line web analytics include measuring the full potential of your website, determining how big the possible target audience is for your niche.

On-line web analytics measure how well people respond to your actual website. For instance, which landing pages produce the highest percentage of online sales? Basically, on-line web analytics offer a numbers-based picture regarding how well your website does its job. Do people interpret the content well? Do they take intended action? All of this data is then used comparatively with key performance indicators so that changes can be implemented that produce more favorable results.

The Importance Of Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics take into account the actual results and ROI from all of your marketing efforts. This means that data is collected from all channels you currently use for marketing; this data is then consolidated so that important pieces are extracted, further analyzed, and put to work. The power of marketing analytics allows you to improve your campaign efforts in many more ways than just the overall design of your website.

Today, marketers employ dozens of techniques into one marketing campaign. This is how marketing analytics arose, out of a need to track all of these efforts across different platforms. You can’t just look at social media data or web analytics data; it isn’t enough to give you a clear enough idea regarding the whole picture. Marketing analytics takes all of these various channels over a certain spread of time into account, thus producing the ability for marketers to make much better decisions. (Read more)

Marketing analytics help you to determine how well your overall marketing techniques are going and how you can improve upon them. Marketing analytics also help break down all of the smaller details. Such as, which marketing effort produced the greatest ROI last year? Or how many leads were generated through social media efforts?

While this helps you take a peek at the past, it also helps you to better analyze the present and future. For instance, how well are you engaging with your audience on social media now compared to last year? What has made this engagement go up or down?

Marketing analytics focuses on customer experience over a longer period of time than one short website visit. It begs answers to questions like: what attracts people to your company? What sparked them to make their first purchase? What are the common experiences people have when doing business with you?

Quality marketing analytics should give you a good idea how all of your combined efforts translate to overall sales.

The One Thing Both Marketing Analytics And Web Analytics Have In Common

Marketing analytics includes a much larger realm of data. Web analytics are taken into consideration with marketing analytics, simply because your website is a tool for marketing that needs to be tracked to see how well it is delivering results. Despite their differences, both of these analytical tools have a HUGE thing in common: Neither matters unless you act upon the data.

You can collect all of the information you want about your current marketing strategies, but if you don’t act on this information correctly it will all be for nothing. Collecting all of this data is really just a way of testing the content you are putting out there to see if it is producing the results you are planning for. This data can be used to identify areas of deficiencies, as well as areas of strength, allowing you to make changes and adjust tactics as need be.

Let’s just be real here, a campaign ALWAYS needs more work. No one can get away with using the same exact marketing campaign over and over, year after year. Therefore, all of this data and knowledge helps guide future campaigns that build with success overtime as you get to know your audience better and better.

Without a solid way to track the success of a campaign you have no way to know if your efforts are paying off or not. This isn’t good for your overall budget or success. Hence why web and marketing analytics grant unparalleled insights that pay off in more ways than one. (Read on)