What is Digital Marketing Analytics?

In today’s digital landscape, data is the driving force behind successful marketing campaigns. Digital marketing analytics empowers businesses to make informed decisions by providing insights into consumer behavior and preferences. 

Analytics plays a crucial role in understanding the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. Businesses can gain valuable insights into their audience, track campaign performance, and make data-driven decisions by analyzing data. In this article, we’ll explore the concept of digital marketing analytics, its significance, and how you can use it to drive success in your marketing strategies.

What is Digital Marketing Analytics?

Digital marketing analytics is the practice of collecting and analyzing data to evaluate and optimize online marketing campaigns. It involves measuring key metrics, such as website traffic, conversions, and engagement, to gain insights and make data-driven decisions. 

Who Uses Analytics?

Short answer: anyone who wants to make informed marketing decisions. Long answer: different teams use marketing analytics in different ways. SEO teams focus on site metrics, while Paid Media teams focus more on ad conversions. Content marketers might look at time on page. All of these metrics live within the world of “digital marketing analytics” in some way shape or form. At Silverback, we on the Analytics team ensures the data systems of our clients (and ourselves) are optimally structured to provide the most valuable data to each one of our teams and our clients in turn.

Gathering Data

If you’re just starting out building your analytics pipeline, you can most easily collect data from three primary sources to obtain a comprehensive view of performance. These are the places that we start with our clients when setting them up via our analytics services. 

Ad Platforms

Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft Ads provide insights into: 

• Campaign performance
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Ad spending

Website Analytics Tools

We source data from platforms like Google Analytics (GA4), which track:

• Website visitor behavior
• Traffic sources
• Pageviews
• Bounce rates
• Conversion funnels
• User engagement metrics

CRM Systems

Data from the client’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, such as Salesforce or HubSpot, is utilized to gain insights into:

• Customer interactions
• Sales data
• Lead generation
• Customer lifecycle information

There are other data sources, of course, but these are the sources that offer the biggest bang for your buck. The more advanced your data analytics capabilities become, the more inputs you can add and the more analysis you can do. 

Why is Digital Marketing Analytics Important?

Silverback focuses on several key metrics to assess the effectiveness of marketing efforts. For many of our clients, the ultimate measure of success is revenue, which is tracked when we are granted access to a client’s CRM system. This allows our team to analyze the end-to-end view of tracking and measuring the bottom-line impact of various marketing campaigns.

In addition to revenue, we closely monitor specific actions on the website that are considered conversions, such as contact form submissions or phone calls. These conversion metrics provide insights into customer engagement and serve as optimization points for our teams and ad platforms. By leveraging this data, our teams can refine and optimize marketing campaigns to drive better results and maximize return on investment (ROI).

By focusing on revenue and conversion metrics, our teams can make data-driven decisions, measure the impact of marketing initiatives, and continuously refine strategies to achieve business goals.

Metrics Based on Type of Marketing Strategy

Different marketing strategies have varying objectives and goals, which can impact the importance of specific metrics. 

For instance, high-funnel campaigns often prioritize driving traffic to specific pages, blog posts, or newsletter sign-ups. In such cases, key metrics might include website traffic volume, click-through rates, time spent on a page, and conversion rates related to the desired actions (e.g., newsletter sign-ups). 

Conversely, other marketing strategies may focus on conversion-driven campaigns where metrics such as conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS) become more critical. The choice of marketing strategy influences the metrics that marketers prioritize and analyze to measure success and make informed decisions.

How to Analyze Digital Marketing Data

Follow these steps to set up data analytics for your company’s marketing campaigns.

1. Define Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you’ve set up analytics tracking, defining your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial. Goals are specific objectives you want to achieve through your marketing efforts, such as increasing website traffic, generating leads, or driving conversions. KPIs are the metrics you will track to measure your progress toward those goals. KPIs include conversion rates, bounce rates, average session duration, and revenue generated.

2. Set up Analytics Tracking and Tagging

The first step in implementing digital marketing analytics is to set up tracking and tagging on your website. This involves implementing tracking codes, such as Google Analytics or other analytics tools, and configuring them to collect relevant data; for example, link your CRM to your Ad Platforms to use offline conversions, or set up hidden form fields on your website to enable end-to-end tracking. 

By placing these tracking codes on your website, you can capture valuable information about user behavior, traffic sources, conversions, and more.

3. Collect and Analyze Data

With analytics tracking in place and goals defined, you can start collecting and analyzing data. Monitor and collect data regularly to gain insights into your marketing campaigns. Set up a report to analyze campaign performance against CRM revenue.

4. Interpret and Act on Insights

Use your report to analyze your marketing campaign (Looker Studios, GA4 Exploration Reports). Interpret the insights derived from your data to make informed decisions. Analyze the data to identify areas where your marketing efforts are succeeding and areas that require improvement. 

Look for patterns, correlations, and trends that can inform your marketing strategies. For example, if analytics reveal that a specific channel or campaign drives high conversion rates, allocate more resources to maximize its impact. If certain campaigns or strategies are underperforming, make data-backed adjustments to optimize their effectiveness.

5. Continuous Optimization and Improvement

Implementing digital marketing analytics requires continuous monitoring, analysis, and optimization. Regularly review your analytics data, track your progress, and adjust your strategies accordingly.

• Short term. Optimize campaigns toward store visits. 
• Long term. Set up broader experiments (with control sets) to measure incremental lift in KPIs (such as in-store transactions or revenue) after adjusting strategy or budget. 

Contact Silverback Strategies Today to Discuss Your Digital Marketing Needs

Digital marketing analytics unlocks your marketing potential. At Silverback, we specialize in data-driven insights that drive success. Let us optimize your strategies, identify improvements, and deliver remarkable results.

Discover how Silverback can elevate your digital marketing. Contact us today. Let’s maximize your campaigns and propel your business.