The complete guide to marketing campaign analytics

You have the recipe for a perfect marketing campaign: eye-catching creative, clear copy, and a watertight distribution strategy. But it’s still missing the most important part — analytics to measure whether or not your campaign was the hit you envisioned or a flop.

Without marketing campaign analytics, you can’t tell if your strategy is effective. If you’ve been struggling to measure campaign performance, you’re in the majority with the 87% of marketers who say data is their company’s most underutilized asset.

Let’s learn how to turn one of marketing’s least utilized assets — data — into your strength with this guide. 

What are marketing campaign analytics?

Marketing campaign analytics is the analysis of all data related to marketing campaign performance. Effective campaign analytics include processes for collecting, reporting, measuring, and analyzing campaigns in an omnichannel marketing approach.

Modern campaign analytics tools can collect data in real time and pull it into digestible formats. This enables you to make fast, data-backed decisions to iterate on your successes, reflect on your failures, or change the course of live campaigns. In other words, analyzing your campaigns doesn’t have to be complicated!

Once you learn how to harness campaign analytics, you can effectively measure performance in a variety of ways: through click-through rates, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, dwell time, or any other KPIs you target.

Why your marketing campaign analytics matter

When you’ve integrated campaign analytics into your marketing loop, you’ll notice it can drive strategy. Insight-rich data is essential for a marketer’s success!

Better market fit

Marketing campaign analytics help you determine the best positioning to reach your audience. 

A good analytics tool will show you the demographic data of users who interact with your campaigns. Armed with this knowledge, you can fine-tune your segmentation to better reach the right users. 

For instance, you might learn that one segment of your audience responds better to retargeting ads on Facebook, so you increase your retargeting budget for that channel.

Stakeholder buy-in

The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for marketing? Stakeholder buy-in. Often elusive, it’s key to success; every marketer wants their judgment trusted and respected. Data holds stakeholder approval captive. If you want buy-in, back your decisions with concrete proof.

Campaign analytics help you determine KPIs, measure success, identify issues, and suggest changes. If you set your reporting up correctly, the numbers don’t lie.

Fine-tuned budget allocation

If your marketing analytics delivers actionable insights, you can figure out which channels are successful and which aren’t. This helps you to decide where to allocate your resources.

For instance, maybe you had all the engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares) telling you Facebook ads were a great use of your time, but analytics helped you discover those metrics haven’t led to more meaningful engagement (like click-throughs). 

On the other hand, maybe your LinkedIn ads get fewer likes or shares or 3X the amount of click-throughs. These are the types of hints marketing analytics can give you so that you can adjust your marketing strategy quickly and easily.

Refined customer personas

We hold a lot of assumptions about our customers. Analytics don’t just help us fine-tune our messaging — they help us understand who we’re talking to and how to segment our audience to speak to each persona.

With the right data, you can identify which segments of your audience like to shop where, their buying habits, and the best ways to reach them.

The 5 key marketing channels to analyze

Knowing how to collect and activate data can depend largely on the channel. These are the five main channels where running successful campaigns depends largely on analytics.

Paid media campaigns

Paid media is often considered the simplest to analyze because the output and input are straightforward: spend money to make money. However, anyone who works with paid media knows it’s never that simple.

With paid media, you serve your ads to users through social media platforms, search engines, and ads native to their platforms to entice them to buy. These types are essential to track:

• Social media ads
• Search engine marketing
• Native ads
• Display ads

Paid media serves ads to users with preferences that match your product niche, remarkets to former or pending customers, serves discount and sale information to loyal customers, and builds more touchpoints for brand awareness. 

The perk of paid media is you’re typically playing in “walled gardens,” or closed platforms that control the content within. They typically require first-party data to access the platform, and with that comes the ability to track user behavior and gather information about user preferences.

The platforms you serve ads on will typically have dashboards to track campaign performance. 

Depending on the platform, you can expect metrics reporting:

• Cost per click (CPC): The hallmark paid metric. This measures the cost for each click you get on an ad, the total cost divided by total number of clicks 
• Click-through rate (CTR): How many people see your ad versus click it
• Conversion rate: The percentage of clicks that result in “conversion,” however you measure that. Typically measured by completing a form or a purchase
• Impressions: Your ad campaign’s overall reach. The number of users who’ve viewed your ad
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): The revenue you’ve generated divided by your total ad spend. This measures your campaign’s financial efficiency
• Customer per conversion (CPA): This is your cost to achieve a conversion. Similar to ROAS, it helps you track whether your campaign is reaching its goals and can be more effective than CPC alone
• Cost per mile (CPM): Your cost for every 1,000 impressions
• Lifetime value (LTV): How much revenue you expect to gain from a customer over a lifetime

Social

We mentioned social media in the paid section, but earned and owned social media is a category of its own. You can work on your company’s social influence by creating your own content, or you can work with others to increase reach:

• Influencer marketing
• User-generated content
• Company-owned content
• Partner content

Tracking social media campaigns can be more difficult than in paid advertising. That’s often because social platforms can’t adequately track a customer journey across several posts, videos, or other touchpoints like it can the single touchpoint of a paid ad.

Nonetheless, there are still some social metrics you can track to gauge reach and efficiency:

• Engagement (likes, comments, shares): Keeping an eye on engagement can show overall growth of brand awareness. If one post has way more engagement than another, it’s a safe bet the post with more engagement has better reach. This metric is best tracked in proportion to impressions
• Impressions: The number of people who viewed a post
• Followers: Measuring follower growth over time shows the number of people supporting your brand
• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of people that have clicked a link on a social post. In conjunction with UTMs, you can gauge which social posts drove action
• Mentions: This measures if others mention or tag your brand

Email campaign analytics

Email campaigns can vary largely by the product or service you offer. If you work in ecommerce, you may see huge value from a single email. For an expensive one-time purchase, you may need a long drip campaign before you see conversions. These are the marketing email campaigns you could expect to report on:

• Newsletters or educational content
• Promotional mail
• Product announcements and updates

Though email analytics are trickier to track than paid media, for instance, they’re an important part of any campaign and therefore need clear reporting — 87% of brands say that email marketing is critical to business success.

A good email marketing software will compile campaign results and give you these data points:

• Open rate: This is straightforward — how many people opened your email? The more, the better, but average open rates for emails hover around 20%.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Similar to the click-through rate on paid or social media, the CTR is how many users click a button on your email. A good email CTR is between 2 and 5%.
• Unsubscribe rate: Like managing a social media follower count, you’ll keep an eye on your email subscribers. Unlike social media, you should expect several subscribers to opt-out after you send an email. However, you want to keep an eye on any spikes in the unsubscribe rate.

SEO

Often considered a top-of-funnel (ToFu) marketing initiative, SEO and organic search can be versatile and low-cost. It’s still a good way to establish authority or help users discover you. You can run these types of campaigns with SEO:

• ToFu keyword content (such as “What is X?” or “How to do X”)
• Product comparisons
• Branded keyword ownership

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SEO helps you own keywords you’d otherwise pay for, which is one way investing in it helps you in the long run. That’s why these metrics are important to track:

• Keyword cost: Many SEO tools estimate the value of your owned keywords. This proves how much you save by appearing organically rather than bidding for that keyword
• Traffic/pageviews: This is the top-level metric to track. More pageviews means more visitors, which can optimize into more conversions
• Keyword rankings and keyword ownership: More high-ranking keywords mean more visibility on search engines. Many SEO specialists optimize specifically for Google keywords
• Conversion rate: As with all campaigns, the ultimate question is how your content prompts users to take a desired action. For SEO, this can be signing up for a demo or downloading gated content

The elements of successful marketing analytics

Now you know the types of data you might collect and where you might collect them. The difficult part, however, is in gathering and making sense of data.

Data works for you when it’s clear and actionable. Here are the elements of clear and actionable marketing analytics.

Data collection

How you collect your data makes a world of difference. If you consult disparate dashboards and multiple spreadsheets to make sense of your analytics, the process costs you hours of extra manual work.

Ideally, you’ll want to consolidate your data in one place. A CDP works well for serving all your consolidated data and making it actionable. This way, you’re not only able to collect accurate data from all your campaigns and channels, but you’re also able to use your platform to build better future campaigns with segmentation, automated triggers, and more.

In sum: the fewer dashboards you have, the better!

Clear attribution model

How you attribute data determines how well you’re able to quantify marketing efforts. With clear attribution, you can allocate the budget better to the channels that succeed. 

Companies choose from these attribution models the one that works best for their campaigns:

• First-touch: Full credit goes to the first attributed action
• Last-touch: Full credit goes to the last attributed action
• Linear: All touchpoints receive equal credit
• Time decay: Touchpoints closer to the time of conversion receive more credit
• U-shaped: First- and last- touches are given the biggest credit while other touchpoints are given partial credit
• W-shaped: First- and last-touch are given the biggest credit in addition to any mid-funnel activities that generate quality leads

Robust reporting

Do your priorities change every quarter, every week, or every day? Since you’re a marketer, the answer is probably a mix of the three. You probably make long-term investments but need to pivot on the minutiae to achieve your goals.

Reporting needs to be robust enough to support these pivots, so search for a reporting platform that delivers real-time updates with the latest information. Because data and customer experiences change quickly in digital marketing, it’s difficult to act on data from a previous quarter.

Better yet, search for a tool that can use machine learning to predict data trends so you can plan pivots ahead of time.

Data activation

Once you have real-time data access, develop ways to systematically act on it or receive insights. We teased predictive analytics in the last section, but that’s a good example of activating data.

Another is using that data to segment your audience, personalize marketing messaging, and send tailoring campaigns for particular triggers. For instance, you can use your data to activate a trigger when someone abandons their cart and sends an email with a coupon code.

This process requires experimentation. Iterate on your findings to tailor your campaigns — it’s all trial and error.

Conclusion

In theory, data analytics is a separate function from most marketing roles. But in reality, you’ll work with data regardless of where you fall in the marketing department. Learning to gather and act on marketing campaign analytics is key to your success, and it will put you in the upper echelons of marketers.

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