When it comes to advertising, your brand has many options for placements and content. In addition to designing the right campaign and choosing the perfect ecommerce partner to engage shoppers, it is important to understand analytics, the data behind your ads.
Analytics use technology to better understand your ads, digital content, placements, and more. Across all online touchpoints, analytics provide valuable insight into traffic, helping you better strategize a more efficient and memorable way to reach shoppers. From sponsored Google search results to YouTube video spots, analytics look at your marketing as a whole, and can be crucial in your budgeting and creative processes. We have gathered our top three reasons why analytics should be an integral part of your marketing plan.
1. Spend wisely.
Analytics are an extremely powerful tool to help budget. These tools allow you to see the exact cost per reach of each channel, and can help you strategize to have the greatest impact at the lowest cost. In this digital era, TV spots may not be as far reaching as a sponsored Instagram post or a viral Facebook video, despite their higher price tag.
By calculating cost per reach, you can understand which channels work best for your brand, and focus your efforts more efficiently. Analytics data can help you reallocate your advertising dollars and ultimately save money.
2. Target customers across lanes.
It is easy to break down each advertisement into its own category, viewing data from TV, magazines, sponsored content, or banner ads in isolation. The Digital Marketing Bureau refers to this as “swim lane” measurement, calculating audiences and impact separately from one another.
In fact, it is wiser to look at analytics as a whole through the shopper journey, which can incorporate a multitude of touchpoints as a potential buyer interacts with your brand. A customer might see a billboard on their daily commute, compounded by a product referral on a commerce platform, before they receive an email promoting the item. Advertising works together, and it is through the use of analytics that the shopper journey becomes clearer.
3. Cut through the noise.
Data can be a powerful, and sometimes overwhelming tool. Thousands of touchpoints and clicks results in huge amounts of data being available to your brand. It can be a challenge to cut through the “noise” and understand the real findings of this data, in order put it to good use. Analytics are the ideal way to collect data and organize it into something valuable for your company. This data can be used for optimization, which can help forecast trends and offer scenarios based on future advertising, helping you predict the success of an advertising campaign. Insights like these can help your company plan for what’s next, and stay ahead of the curve.