Agencies Without Marketing Analytics are Destined to Fail

If there’s one thing we here at Duco Media have learned over the years, it’s this: Agencies that don’t have digital marketing analytics are destined to fall. Succeeding digitally requires an enormous amount of effort, resources, and the ability to sift through constant streams of data. Without the use of software, marketers and agencies lack the foresight to maximize their campaigns and create productive feedback loops between their analytics and marketing efforts.

First, a Few Definitions

Marketing is a means of persuading someone to purchase a product or service, as well as influencing their perception and motivations. Digital marketing in particular tries to accomplish these goals through the use of popular internet applications and websites. The benefits of marketing in the digital world are increased accuracy for audience targeting, more finite campaign management, and, of course, real-time availability of performance metrics.

In a marketing sense, analytics is the study of these digital campaign metrics. The goal of this research is to provide the marketers and business owners with solid, science-based recommendations on how to make campaigns generate more results at a lower cost-per-result. In addition, analytical data can help a business segment and define their audience, confirm their attribution model, observe detailed audience activity, and predict highs and lows in purchasing and engagement behaviour. In other words, marketing analytics provides actionable insights that help increase sales, lead generation, engagement, and brand presence on various social and web-based platforms.

“The goal of this research is to provide the marketers and business owners with solid, science based recommendations…”

One of the most challenging aspects of marketing analytics today is that each ad and social platform has their own analytical data. Discerning analytical insights from this cross-platform data can be difficult, but immensely rewarding. Cross platform data provides the opportunity to run advanced analytics like machine learning and big data analytics, which help identify patterns on a higher operational level that you may not have seen or been aware of otherwise.

Think of it this way: You and your team have created the perfect campaign and, after weeks of prep, are ready to launch across all social platforms. The visuals are perfect, the copy is concise, and you’ve defined your audience realistically and accurately. Unfortunately, without analytics you’ve relinquished control over your campaign the second you hit ‘publish’. Most of us fall into the trap of endlessly tinkering with audiences, placements, and keywords until we start to doubt the effectiveness of the ad itself.

Now let’s say the ad performed well. Congratulations team! Although conversions are soaring, what good is it if you’re unaware of what you did right? Without being able to attribute successes and failures to specific, identifiable analytical data, launching campaigns is like rolling a die.

How to Use Analytics Successfully

So what does a business that uses digital marketing analytics successfully look like? Repeating the example above, analytical data is used immediately to optimize campaign budgets and assess performance of all live marketing campaigns against one another. If you’ve decided to split test certain creative elements or campaign settings, you’ll now be able to see why ad set A performed better than ad set B instead of simply cancelling one and pooling the budget into the other. Finally, it helps identify success indicators and evaluate marketing efforts from top to bottom. Were conversions linked with more colourful visuals? What video length is optimal for higher click-through-rates? Which pathways lead to site visitors making the most high-value conversions? In summary, investing in marketing analytics gives your business 360° awareness over your marketing efforts.

From a Digital Marketing Agency perspective, marketing analytics provide this increased vision and control to all your clients, literally. Being able to visualize data is integral to noticing patterns, presenting analytics to clients, and making quick, actionable insights. As marketers, we’ve all had client meetings where we wish there was a clear way to express to a client exactly how what you and your team are doing is positively impacting their bottom line. Without analytics to back you up, all the jargon in the world won’t save you from a poorly performing campaign.

“...implementing scientific practices will be the most powerful differentiator between you and your competition.”

At a higher level, Marketing Analytics lets you compare your clients in a standardized, scientific way that helps cut time out of your future campaign plans, as well as give your clients access to a larger pool of analytical data. With so much marketing knowledge amounting to nothing more than trend-chasing and buzzwords, implementing scientific practices will be the most powerful differentiator between you and your competition.

Of course, we aren’t expecting you to whip out your old T.I. calculator and start crunching engagement stats. There are fortunately many software programs out there that can get you started with Marketing Analytics. However, the issue with these out-of-the-box solutions is that they lack the specificity to fit your business or agency’s unique situation. That’s why we developed our own Marketing Analytics Software (Duco Analytics) with customizable solutions in mind. You’ll get to work closely with our development team to ensure a flawless integration across any and all platforms as well as one-on-one support with our dev team. Read more about Duco Analytics here.