Marketing Analytics Techniques

Marketing analytics covers many areas nowadays: PPC advertising, SEO, email marketing, social media, marketplace optimisation, etc. Each of these marketing tactics produces a lot of data which can be used to analyse and optimise the marketing performance. 

In this article we will cover the marketing analytics techniques that we use and how marketers can use them to optimise their efforts.

Marketing Mix Analysis

A common marketing analytics technique is to compare the PPC marketing sources side by side. This helps to clearly see which sources are better at raising awareness (since they have lower CPM), which sources are better at driving sales (since they have lower cost per purchase) and which sources are more profitable (since they have higher ROAS).

Marketers can use the results of this analysis to inform their marketing mix strategy going forward. For example if marketers find that they get the lowest CPM on Facebook, they might decide to run their awareness campaigns there and publish conversion campaigns to Bing or Google.

It is easiest to create this analysis in Looker Studio since you can combine the data from multiple sources inside a single dashboard. The data can then be blended together and all the data sources can be compared together based on the identified metrics.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a popular technique across all the marketing channels. The marketers would usually release 2 different variants of the same campaign, evaluate the differences in performance and choose the one with better performance for their future efforts. 

For example in email marketing people often A/B test subject lines to see which one leads to higher open rate. The campaign with a lower open rate is usually paused while the winning campaign is optimised further through another round of A/B testing.

Similarly, SEO marketers A/B test the article titles, PPC marketers A/B test the ad creative thumbnails, etc. It is safe to say that A/B testing is the backbone of marketing analytics. 

Many marketing tools have embedded capabilities for A/B testing which can be further enhanced with Looker Studio dashboards. If you are A/B testing for the purposes of conversion rate optimisation of your website landing pages, consider using tools like Google Optimize. 

Attribution Modelling 

Attribution modelling is an advanced marketing analytics technique which aims to more accurately measure the impact of every marketing channel on the final sales figure.  

For example, a large percentage of your customers will interact with your brand on multiple channels before converting. They might first see your Facebook ad, then like your Instagram post, then find your article on Google and only then they would complete the purchase on your website. Without attribution modelling Google would get all the credit for the conversion since it was the last customer touchpoint. However, attribution modelling allows to distribute the credit for the conversion equally between all the customer touchpoints. 

This way the marketers can see a more accurate view of how much each channel contributes to revenue. These insights can be used to better understand customer journeys and plan for further investments into each marketing channel.

Loyalty Analytics

If your ecommerce website is running on Shopify or a similar system, it is likely that you have all the data you need to analyse customer loyalty. You can use Shopify data to calculate loyalty score (0-100%) for every customer based on how often they buy, their average order value and how many different products they have bought before. 

You can then analyse what products the loyal customers buy and promote these products to your new customers. The idea being is that these products increase customer loyalty and if you offer them to new customers, you can retain them for longer. 

Another use case of this analysis is identifying the lapsed customers (those who haven’t bought from you in a while) and target them aiming to reactivate them.

This analysis is quite advanced so you would typically need to extract the raw data from Shopify into a database and analyse it in a BI tool like Looker Studio.

Funnel Analysis

Funnel analysis requires the marketers to clearly identify the steps in their marketing funnel and then measure the conversion rates between each step. This marketing analytics technique opens multiple possibilities for optimising marketing performance.   

For example, marketers can filter their funnel by the source of traffic to see which marketing channel converts the traffic better. Marketers can also experiment with their website content on every step of the funnel to see if this makes a difference to the conversion rate.  

Reverse Path Analysis

Reverse Path Analysis is quite easy to do in Google Analytics. This marketing analytics technique helps to see which pages on your website a user goes through before converting. GA4 offers reverse path analysis by default, you just need to configure it.  

When you log in to your GA4, go to Explore and then Path Exploration. Click Start Again and then select the “ending node”. Choose “event name” and then choose your conversion event such as “purchase” or “form submission”.

In your step-1 you need to choose “page title and screen name”. You can then see what pages your website visitors viewed before converting. You can click on a page name to expand the category and see the step-2, step-3 ,etc.

Reverse path analysis helps to understand what your website visitors want to know before converting. You can use this information to improve the design of your landing page. If you are in B2B, you can also use this information to learn more about the interests of your lead before you have a call with them.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are essential for conversion rate optimization on your website. They are basically video recordings of the sessions of your visitors on the website: you can see exactly what they click, which areas of the page they spend their time on and where they drop off. 

If you want to collect heatmaps, you need a CRO software like Hotjar. You will then be able to view the video recordings of these sessions yourself and create hypotheses on what can be done to optimise your website for conversions.

Heatmaps are very valuable for websites with little traffic because they help to collect detailed data on the limited number of sessions that they receive. Heatmaps enable marketers to learn as much as possible from these sessions which is very valuable.

Competitor Analysis 

Competitor analysis is a marketing analytics technique that can be applied to many areas of marketing including SEO, PPC and even traditional branding. There are many tools that allow you to spy on your competitor’s search ads, top pages and backlinks including  SEMRush and Ahrefs. There are similar tools for social media ads as well such as ContentStudio.io. 

The data from those tools can be extracted into Looker Studio for further analysis as well. This would help marketers to measure their share of voice vs competitors over time and ensure that the brand is moving in the right direction.

Conclusion

Whereas this list is not exhaustive, it provides several marketing analytics techniques that could be applied to most businesses. We would recommend starting with installing some free Looker Studio templates in order to start your marketing analytics journey. 

As you progress through your marketing analytics journey, your analytics tools will help you achieve continuous improvements for your marketing tactics which inevitably lead to competitive advantage.