Over the last few years marketers have improved in the analytics arena. Today, most marketing teams are tracking results in some shape or form as more tracking tools are made available. There are web analytics, predictive analytics, business analytics, business intelligence tools and more. The question is, with so many tools and measurements at our fingertips, which analytics best help us calculate return on investment (ROI)?
In order to get a true picture of ROI, marketing metrics should look at key performance indicators (KPIs) which add value to the business. Hit rates, posts and impressions are all well and good but they should be tied together with results such as enquiries or sales.
Your marketing analytics should tell you if your marketing programme is running above, below or on par with current or past benchmarks. As such, your KPIs should provide insights on the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
A term that is used a lot since the dawn of social media is “engagement”. Engagement is a marketing strategy that directly engages consumers and invites and encourages consumers to interact with your brand. That could be anything from asking target customers to sign up for a monthly newsletter or to repost something on their social media page. For engagement metrics you’ll want to look at KPIs that show the volume and quality of prospects you have collected / interacted with as a result of your marketing efforts.
However, analytics that matter are much more than numbers. Simply pulling numbers into a dashboard doesn’t constitute tracking or understanding results. Are those numbers useful? Yes. Are they meaningful to the business? It’s how you use those numbers that matters. Your marketing efforts need to be a means to an end. They need to have a goal such as an enquiry, a sale or increased awareness of your brand. Your analytics need to show how you are moving towards that goal so that you can calculate ROI.