Marketing Analytics Paints a Clearer Picture of Site

Marketing analytics consulting simplifies a brand’s effort to understand its customer. It combines data, user behavior and trends and then analyzes the relationships between them. The result of this effort produces a clearer picture marketers can use to guide current and future marketing decisions.

At the heart of every picture lies the user experience. Marketers can create buyer personas and identify target audiences to visualize a customer, but ultimately how a user interacts with a website, ad, or landing page provides the clearest picture of marketing that works and marketing that doesn’t. Customer actions validate the accuracy of the personas or confirm the understanding of the audience.

Online, the only way to understand the customer comes from precise and accurate marketing analytics. Here are four ways marketing analytics paint a clearer picture and create actionable next steps.

It Starts with Marketing Analytics Consulting

The first step to paint the picture comes from an analysis of current efforts. The most honest assessment comes from a third party. An outsider, an individual or an agency, who is not invested in the outcomes of what was done can offer the most honest assessment. They bring a different perspective and not being part of the brand team may see things differently.

A view from the outside is especially important in the always-changing world of digital marketing. A sudden shift in user behavior, a change to search engine formats or even an adjustment in company goals can require a re-focusing effort.

Marketing analytics consulting efforts start with a validation of the current data. They measure current campaigns against the data and ask questions. They also offer recommendations on how to optimize websites, paid search campaigns and possibly even a brand’s App experience.

Identify Key Touch Points

At BFO, we use a proprietary “Click Intelligence” platform to create what we call heat maps. These are key user touch points. Regardless of what system a brand uses, it should identify user behavior across websites and apps. By observing user interaction, a brand can see where conversions convert the best (and not change it!) and where there may be gaps that need improvement or simply to be better understood.

Sometimes, singular KPIs don’t paint the entire picture. Often, the bigger picture of user interaction from first to last click paints the clearest picture. This big picture is made up of lots of little points. Think of it like pixels in printed image or Seurat’s pointillism masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It takes a lot of tiny dots to create these beautiful pictures.

In many ways a brand’s every touch point is like each little dot. Understand each one, put it where it belongs, and a brand can create a beautiful marketing masterpiece.

Tracks Trends

Digital marketing trends can change fast. Properly setup, marketing analytics can deliver real-time reporting to alert marketers to sudden shifts. Tracking trends in real-time can save brands time and money.

Make Data Accessible

One of the biggest challenges for marketers is data collection and analysis. Marketing analytics services that use platforms like Google Analytics or Analytics360 accomplish the task of gathering user data. Other platforms simplify the task of sorting, organizing and even analyzing the data quickly. Other tools like Clicky and BigQuery help with data analysis.

A good marketing analytics consultant can help setup dashboard views for easy access. Dashboards offer brands immediate pictures of what’s happening for the clearest picture. This last element of data accessibility is a must for marketing analytics to be a tool for real-time decision-making rather than a report on historic events.

Turning Marketing Analytics into Action

Marketing analytics consulting gives brands the ability to turn data into action. While this can be done internally if the staff is big enough, an outside agency can leverage its many tools to monitor and report back to a client. The vast amount of data collected paints a clear picture for analytics experts that they can then deliver through clear reporting that offers insight and actionable steps.

In the end, the effort to create, track and understand the picture exists to provide the best possible user experience. Every webpage, display ad and paid search click, to name a few, contains invaluable data. With this data, a brand can increase revenues and build its reputation, but most importantly, enhance its customers’ online experience.

Originally published at BFO.