Why Marketing Analytics Are Crucial to Marketing Teams

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Why Do KPIs Matter?
Where Does KPI Data Come From?
The Top 5 Marketing KPIs
Understanding How Marketing Analytics Vary by Company Size

Brands use marketing analytics to measure the performance of their marketing efforts. By looking at crucial data related to key performance indicators (KPIs), you can better assess whether your team is getting the results it wants. Let’s dive deeper into marketing analytics and how KPIs are a central component.

Why Do KPIs Matter?

In order to understand why KPIs matter, you must first learn what a KPI is. KPI stands for key performance indicators, which is a way you can quantifiably measure progress toward a particular goal. KPIs matter for the following reasons:

They help teams assess if their marketing has a positive influence on business success.
Teams use KPIs to compare how their performance has changed over time.
They can track quality, compliance, performance, and efficiency.

Where Does KPI Data Come From?

Brands get their KPI data through different marketing analytics. For example, when looking at social media interactions, these include comments, likes, and post sharing. These numbers come from the following sources:

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

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The Top 5 Marketing KPIs

The KPIs a business chooses should solely be based on what they need to know in order to assess their performance and growth. These are the top five marketing KPIs many businesses look at:

Website and Blogging

Within website and blogging, there are many different marketing analytics to look at. For instance, a brand could create a KPI for the following metrics:

Bounce rate – The number of visitors who view only one website page before exiting
Click-through rate – The percentage of search queries that lead to a click to a website
Downloads – The number of times visitors download a website’s downloadable features (i.e., e-books, case studies, white pages)
Organic traffic – The amount of traffic from unpaid search results
Returning visits – How many visitors come to your website again after an initial visit

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of tailoring your website and its content to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP). Creating a KPI for the following SEO data can help your marketing team see if your SEO efforts are actually helping you drive more website traffic:

Keyword rankings – How a webpage ranks in a search engine when searching for a particular keyword
Page authority – How major websites view your webpages
Page load speed – How fast a webpage loads (Faster speeds can make your website rank higher)
Search traffic – How much traffic a website gets through a search engine

Social Media

Understanding how many customers are engaging with your social media accounts tells marketers a lot about the effort they put into major social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Creating KPIs for these social media metrics can help you work toward boosting follower engagement:

Comments – How many users comment on a given post
Likes – How many users like a given post
New followers – How many followers you gain over a set period of time.
Page demographics – Information about who is following your pages, including age, sex, location, and occupation.
Social media conversions – How many website or blog conversions happen as a result of sharing them on social media.

Email Marketing

Many marketing teams use email marketing to drive conversions. They tend to create KPIs for these email marketing metrics:

Clicks – The number of people who clicked a link in your email
Forwards – The number of people who forwarded your email to another person
Newsletter sign-ups – The number of people who opted into your mailing list
Opens – The number of people who opened your email
Traffic – The amount of website or blog traffic driven through email marketing

PPC

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It’s a form of internet advertising marketers use to drive traffic to their website. Essentially, you pay per each time someone clicks your ad. Marketers create KPIs based on the following PPC metrics:

Cost per click (CPC) – How much it costs to get a single ad click
Click-through rate (CTR) – How many people click on an ad based on how often it shows up
Return on ad spend (ROAS) – The amount of revenue you generate versus the amount spent on a PPC ad campaign

Understanding How Marketing Analytics Vary by Company Size

Let’s take a look at how marketing analytics can vary by the size of a company:

Startups

When working in a startup, it can often feel like the Wild West. Since there are usually a lot of fast-moving parts in startups, it’s important to have structured company goals and KPIs to measure the progress of such goals. Early on, a startup may want to measure user engagement to learn what’s working and what’s not working with their products or services. Looking at growth metrics is very important, too, since the goal is to impress early investors. In fact, many investors may require such data before making any financial decisions.

Enterprise

Since enterprise companies are more established than startups, the data they look at can be quite different. Truthfully, the data points a company looks at will vary based on its overarching goals. Since enterprises may have a solid customer base, they may look at using new channels to reach customers or finding ways to connect with their target audience. They may use Google Analytics and its 510 unique dimensions and metrics to look at SEO, social media, public relations, and content marketing.

Without marketing analytics and KPIs, there’s no way to determine the progress of your marketing efforts. When companies fail to look at their numbers, they may continue to roll out the same boring campaigns and see little results. By looking at quantitative data, you can better understand what works and what needs to be fixed.

Knowledge Base: Intro to Marketing