Learn More About Marketing Analytics Software
What is Marketing Analytics Software?
Marketing analytics software helps businesses gather data from multiple sources and channels to identify which marketing initiatives are performing well and which have room for improvement. Leveraging marketing analytics software is imperative when calculating ROI on marketing campaigns, which help optimize digital marketing spend. Finally, with the help of marketing analytics tools, marketers can operate more efficiently by learning how to better allocate their time.
Marketing metrics and marketing analytics are completely different, and it’s important to note the distinction. Marketers are inundated with metrics, or data points, that they can use to dictate marketing activities and boost customer satisfaction. However, without analytics, marketers won’t be able to take that next step. Marketing analytics puts those metrics into context, turning them into actionable insights and helping drive revenue.
What Types of Marketing Analytics Software Exist?
While the overall goal of a marketing analytics platform is to help marketers measure and optimize marketing performance, the methods and tools used to accomplish this goal can vary from product to product. Selecting the optimal software for a business is a matter of finding a product that integrates well with their existing technology stack.
Standalone solutions
Standalone marketing analytics tools connect to multiple data sources and marketing channels to measure campaign performance. These products typically integrate with marketing automation software, CRM software, digital advertising software, and digital analytics software. Standalone platforms collect and consolidate marketing campaign data from these disparate sources, enabling marketers to analyze campaign performance across channels and audiences. While standalone products may include tools for optimizing digital ads, they do not provide built-in capabilities for executing omnichannel marketing campaigns.
All-in-one marketing suites
All-in-one marketing suites help marketers plan, execute, and measure cross-channel marketing campaigns. In addition to marketing analytics, these end-to-end solutions provide features for implementing marketing campaigns through email, social media, display ads, landing pages, and more. All-in-one marketing suites can include marketing automation software and account-based marketing platforms.
What are the Common Features of Marketing Analytics Software?
To bolster accountability and help marketers seize more control over their company's strategic revenue generation goals, marketers need to have the ability to measure the performance of their entire marketing funnel. Below are some marketing analytics software features that help leverage marketing data to drive actionable results.
Data collection: Before analyzing data and turning it into actionable insights, marketers will need to use marketing analytics solution to collect data on all of their marketing campaigns. This type of software can collect data on the campaigns distributed across a variety of channels. This data is essential to kickstart the process of collecting insights into the customers’ and prospects’ preferences and history.
Return on investment (ROI): Marketers have numerous metrics to potentially analyze, which can often lead to data paralysis. Marketing analytics software helps marketers make sense of all those metrics and determine the effectiveness and ROI of marketing campaigns. Marketers must not only optimize marketing strategies but also prove and improve ROI to present to executive leaders within their company. The ROI measurement feature within the marketing analytics tools can quantify the outcome of every marketing investment users make.
Reports and dashboards: It’s imperative to not only analyze data but to also showcase analysis within a report to present the findings. Marketing analytics software help generate visualizations and reports for the entire marketing funnel from acquisition to close. These reports and custom dashboards gather closed-loop reporting on all marketing initiatives. Within some reporting features, users can drill down into specific data points or filter by certain criteria to uncover trends and take action for future campaigns. Marketing analytics software enable marketers to track all of this data in one place to easily analyze and share with the rest of their team and company. Finally, this feature will empower marketers to make accurate forecasting decisions for their future marketing goals and strategies.
Attribution reports: Attribution reporting helps analyze touchpoints or marketing channels that should receive credit for a conversion. There are various attribution models that marketing analytics software can provide, including last interaction attribution, first click attribution, and multi-touch attribution models that consist of linear attribution, time decay attribution, and position-based attribution. The last interaction attribution model gives credit to the last traffic source that resulted in the conversion of a consumer. First click attribution models are the opposite of that, wherein it gives all the credit to the first channel a consumer visited.
Multi-touch attribution uses weighted modeling to be able to allocate credit across multiple channels, campaigns, and touchpoints. Linear attribution is a form of multi-touch attribution that distributes credit evenly across every touchpoint in the buyer journey. Time decay attribution gives more credit to the touchpoints closest to the buyer’s conversion and less credit to the prior touchpoint. Finally, position-based attribution gives credit to two key touchpoints: the first touch that gets the visitor in the door and the last touch when a lead converts. These two touches get 40% of the credit and the remaining touchpoints equally split the remaining 20%.
Multichannel tracking: To be able to paint a complete picture around marketing campaign effectiveness, it’s important to gather and analyze data across a variety of marketing channels. Multichannel tracking helps collect marketing performance data across numerous marketing channels, such as email, social media, SMS, display ads, search engine marketing, and landing pages, to allow marketers to deliver targeted and timely marketing content to their intended audience.
What are the Benefits of Marketing Analytics Software?
Businesses of all sizes and across all industries can benefit from marketing analytics software because it empowers them to make better decisions about digital marketing strategies. Executive leadership teams expect a story behind metrics, or reasoning to back up marketing decisions. Marketing analytics tools enable a business to measure their key performance indicators (KPIs) and provide the reasoning to back up marketing choices. This results in a better understanding of what channels to use and why, along with effective resource allocation.
Actionable insights: Marketing analytics software empowers marketers to make informed, proactive decisions around their marketing strategy. Actionable insights infer strategic and tactical next steps, which will allow users to set marketing goals before they even start collecting any data. That can directly tie back to their business objectives to prove ROI. Actionable insights answer questions such as:
- What is the marketing channel that should be focused on?
- What content is resonating well with the target audience?
- How should a business prioritize their marketing budget next year?
Real-time insights: An enormous benefit that comes from marketing analytics is the ability to take in-the-moment data on how customers or prospects are interacting with their brand and make decisions in real time. Real-time data has completely changed how marketers interact with their consumers, as they can immediately target a consumer’s preferences based on their current interactions and conversations. Marketing analytics software allows companies to leverage real-time data, enabling them to then adjust marketing strategy and demonstrate expertise in a specific area or topic. Some marketing analytics products incorporate machine learning to gain even deeper insights from data in real time.
Who Uses Marketing Analytics Software?
Unsurprisingly, marketers find the greatest benefit from using marketing analytics tools. A company’s entire marketing team must take a holistic view of their marketing analytics, as it will drive decisions that impact the overall marketing strategy within a business. Social media marketers and digital marketers are two main roles that examine marketing analytics, although other specialized marketers would also benefit from marketing analytics software to optimize their campaigns, including field marketers, event marketers, marketing generalists, etc. Marketing analytics software helps any marketer address three essential areas of marketing performance management: optimization, attribution, and justification.
For small or new businesses that may not have the resources to hire an in-house marketing team, a marketing agency would also be able to use marketing analytics software to align with a company’s goals. Marketing agencies can leverage marketing analytics tools to inform a business on where their marketing dollars would be best used, as well as present an ROI analysis for any campaigns deployed by the agency.
What are the Alternatives to Marketing Analytics Software?
Alternatives to marketing analytics software can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:
Analytics platforms: Analytics platforms, also known as business intelligence (BI) platforms, help businesses assemble, manage, and analyze business data to uncover actionable insights. While analytics platforms can be used to analyze digital marketing data, these products often provide a much more robust set of features for modeling, blending, and discovering large datasets. Analytics platforms are typically used by data analysts or business analysts, while marketing analytics software is designed to be easier for marketing professionals to use.
Digital analytics software: Digital analytics software, also known as web analytics software, tracks website visitors, measures web traffic, and helps determine how visitors are finding and interacting with websites and landing pages. This type of software also aims to optimize customer experiences and does so by measuring and analyzing metrics like web sessions, unique visitors, user entry, and exit pages. Marketers can use digital analytics software to track clicks and conversion rates on performance marketing campaigns.
Software Related to Marketing Analytics Software
Related solutions that can be used together with marketing analytics software include:
Customer journey analytics: Marketing analytics is an important part of understanding and improving the customer journey. Customer journey analytics software takes this a step further by enabling marketers to visualize customer behavior across channels and optimize future customer interactions. These products combine customer data with marketing insights to create a 360-degree view of customers and the customer journey.
Social media analytics software: This type of software, like marketing analytics, helps companies gain a better understanding of consumers’ desires and responsiveness but gathers and reports on data solely related to social media accounts. Social media analytics software can help track how people engage with the content users post on social media in terms of likes, comments, and shares.
SEO software: Search engine optimization (SEO) software offers a variety of tools to help businesses improve their rankings in search engines. Some marketing analytics products may include features of SEO software like rank tracking.
Content analytics software: Any visitor interactions with their published content, including blogs, articles, on-demand webinars, etc., can be measured and interpreted to help gain visibility to drive future content marketing strategies. Metrics measured by content analytics software include page views and shares, outbound clicks, search rankings, and average time spent on individual posts. Additionally, content analytics software can help users stay on top of the most recent and popular content published by their competitors.
Attribution software: Marketing attribution reports are available within some marketing analytics software. Similarly, attribution software can be used by companies to help determine how actions, events, or touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle contribute to the success of marketing efforts. This type of software commonly integrates with software solutions used by sales, marketing, or public relations departments, like CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, email tracking, demand generation, or sales analytics tools.
Challenges with Marketing Analytics Software
Implementing a new software solution can come with its own set of challenges, and marketing analytics software is no exception. Before purchasing a product, it’s imperative to be aware of the potential issues that may arise and how to address them.
Data volume and accuracy: Even with marketing analytics tools, if the metrics users are analyzing aren’t accurate, they won’t gain valuable insights. If businesses use third-party data, they run the risk of gathering inaccurate data since they won’t have a direct relationship with those users. Additionally, with so many channels, activities, and methods of gathering data, the sheer quantity of data can be overwhelming. As digital marketing continues to grow, marketers are producing more data than ever before. Marketing analytics software helps marketers analyze large amounts of data from social media platforms, email marketing, website analytics, and CRM systems, to name a few.
Privacy concerns: More often than not, anything related to data is going to bring with it privacy concerns. Consumers are warier now about how their personal data is being collected and used. Marketing analytics tools collect data on everyone in their marketing funnel, from first interaction to conversion, and throughout those touchpoints, marketers can gain an abundance of metrics that will provide competitive advantages. It’s important to stay abreast of new data privacy laws and restrictions and how they can impact marketing analytics.
How to Buy Marketing Analytics Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Marketing Analytics Software
Whether a company is purchasing marketing analytics software for the first time or looking to replace their current system, G2.com can assist them with the selection process.
First, buyers should evaluate the need for marketing analytics software and determine what functionality will be most useful for the business. For example:
- What are their business’ goals in purchasing a marketing analytics product?
- What are the marketing channels they want to track now and in the future?
- Does the product need to integrate with any other software?
- What analytics features, if any, are already available in their current marketing technology stack?
- What is their budget?
Compare Marketing Analytics Software Products
Create a long list
Based on the list of requirements, buyers should create a long list of no more than 10 products that appear to meet the business needs. Consulting online review sites is a great way to start the long list. G2’s marketing analytics software category can help buyers find the highest rated or most popular products based on reviews from verified customers.
Create a short list
After creating a long list, buyers should narrow down their selections by eliminating the products that won’t meet their business needs. Pricing, integrations, and customer support may be factors that contribute to a product’s suitability.
Conduct demos
Once a short list of about three to five products is ready, companies should begin reaching out to vendors to schedule demos. Demos allow buyers to take a closer look at each product’s functionality and ease of use. This may also be the first opportunity to glimpse each vendor’s onboarding style and service levels.
Selection of Marketing Analytics Software
Choose a selection team
When it comes to purchasing a marketing analytics solution, the selection team should primarily consist of executives, managers, and individual contributors in the marketing department. The selection team should also consist of a project manager to coordinate efforts and ensure the process runs smoothly.
Negotiation
Before signing a contract, buyers should make sure to negotiate for the best price and ask about any discounts for which their business may qualify. This is also the time to discuss implementation and onboarding services and payment plans.
Final decision
In the days and months after signing the contract, buyers should monitor the company’s progress with the new marketing analytics product. Is the product working as intended? Have employees fully adopted the product’s features? Will the product scale with the company’s growth? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” the buyer should consider raising the concerns with the vendor. If they are unable to resolve these issues, it may be time to look for alternatives.
Marketing Analytics Software Trends
AI-powered optimization
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more widely available and less costly to implement, many marketing analytics vendors are enhancing their products with AI optimization. By incorporating machine learning into marketing analytics, these AI-powered products enable marketers to process vast amounts of data and make predictions about marketing campaigns. Products leverage AI in different ways, such as optimizing marketing spend or adjusting bids on pay-per-click campaigns to improve ROI.
