Measuring and optimizing your marketing activities is known as marketing analytics. This goes far beyond web analytics, which tracks the performance of your website. Marketing analytics takes a big-picture approach and not only evaluates your efforts on-site but also considers offline criteria and metrics. It enables you to understand what is working, what needs improvement, which requires a change in direction, and what should be scrapped. Here are some of the potential benefits of adopting a policy of ongoing comprehensive marketing analytics.

Assessing Performance

Marketing analytics allows you to track how your current marketing efforts are paying off. Web analytics provides counts of the number of visitors to your site, how long they spend there, and the conversion rate. Marketing analytics goes beyond this to measure the number of shares you receive according to content topics as well as the significance of comments and conversations. You can count the number of signups you get due to email campaigns, tweets during webinars, and brand mentions after events. In short, you obtain a larger picture of how potential and current customers react to your efforts.

Observing and Analyzing Competitors

It is imperative that businesses analyze the marketing efforts of their competitors, yet many fail to take the time to do so. This is important to implement not just once when you are beginning your business but on a continual basis. You need to know what your competition is testing, where they are putting their investment efforts, and in which networks and channels they are focusing most of their marketing.

Predicting Trends

Besides tracking your current marketing efforts, you need to assess how effective they are in the long term. The gains you make in the short term should build momentum that carries on into the future. Marketing analytics allows you to foresee the ongoing effectiveness of your efforts so you can make improvements to optimize future performance.

Making Decisions

Marketing analytics provides you with the data you need to make better-informed decisions concerning marketing and investments. You will have the information necessary to assess how to best focus your efforts. You’ll know where you can spend your money and time to achieve the greatest results.