Marketing Analytics – Success Through Analysis

Understanding Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Understanding marketing analytics allows marketers to be more efficient at their jobs and minimize wasted web marketing dollars.

Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer profound insights into customer preferences and trends. Despite these compelling benefits, a majority of organizations fail to ever realize the promises of marketing analytics due to the challenges of being able to measure ROI.

However, with the advent of search engines, paid search marketing, search engine optimization, and powerful new software products from WordStream, marketing analytics is more powerful and easier to implement than ever.

The Importance of Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics, Internet (or Web) marketing analytics in particular, allow you to monitor campaigns and their respective outcomes, enabling you to spend each dollar as effectively as possible.

The importance of marketing analyics is obvious: if something costs more than it returns, it’s not a good long-term business strategy. In a 2008 study, the Lenskold Group found that “companies making improvements in their measurement and ROI capabilities were more likely to report outgrowing competitors and a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency in their marketing.” Simply put: Knowledge is power.

In search marketing in particular, one of the most powerful marketing performance metrics comes in the form of keywords. Keywords tell you exactly what is on the mind of your current and potential customers. In fact, the most valuable long-term benefit of engaging in paid and natural search marketing isn’t incremental traffic to your website, it’s the keyword data contained within each click which can be utliized to inform and optimize other business processes.

• Product Design: Keywords can reveal exactly what features or solutions your customers are looking for.
• Customer Surveys: By examining keyword frequency data you can infer the relative priorities of competing interests.
• Industry Trends: By monitoring the relative change in keyword frequencies you can identify and predict trends in customer behavior.
• Customer Support: Understand where customers are struggling the most and how support resources should be deployed.

Marketing Analytics: How and Where to Start

The Web is clearly the only game in town. Statistics show that almost 90% of the entire North American population is online. The quickest and easiest way to reach out to this huge market is through paid search marketing, for example, advertising on Google Ads or through other search engines.

Reports and information received from search marketing help in all areas of your business, including offline revenue and product development.

When implementing your search efforts, be sure keep these five tips in mind.

Five Online Marketing Tips:

• Start with Keyword Research: A stagnant keyword list is dangerous as it neglects trends and information on new products or developments.
• Set up some Paid Search Marketing Campaigns: Group keywords in relevant groups and write appropriate ad text to help improve your Quality Score, which will lower your bid and improve ad position.
• Analyze the Results: Displaying your keywords in ad text prove to the searcher and to Google that your ad is relevant to their search.
• Implement Natural Search: Google estimates that 80% of searchers click on an organic result over a paid advertisement. Incorporate your best performing keywords into your website and continue to generate relevant content.
• Repeat Ad Nauseum: Negative keywords are great because they prevent unnecessary clicks and spend, ensuring your advertisement displays only for applicable searches.

Improve Your Marketing Strategy with the Google Ads Performance Grader

A successful online marketing strategy relies on a winning Google Ads campaign. The strength of your campaigns will dictate how well you rank in Google; without a decent ranking, your site will never be seen by prospective clients.

Wordstream’s Google Ads Performance Grader is a comprehensive Google Ads analytics tool that helps you evaluate how your Google Ads campaigns are performing on several key criteria, such as:

• Effective use of negative keywords
• Quality Score
• Long-tail keyword optimization
• Text ad optimization

The Google Ads Performance Grader shows you where and how to make improvements to your campaign that will improve your performance and save you money. It’s an expert analysis, and it’s absolutely free! Consider utilizing this great tool in your efforts to improve your online marketing campaign.

Use WordStream’s Google Ads Performance Grader to see how you stack up against competitors and where you can improve your Google Ads campaign.

Unlike most other marketing analysis tools, WordStream marries analytics and action. Don’t just gather data about your marketing campaigns; act on that data for better results!