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.

Marketing analytics involves the technologies and processes CMOs and marketers use to evaluate the success and value of their efforts. As such, marketing analytics uses various metrics to measure the performance of marketing initiatives. Effective marketing analytics gathers data from all sources and channels and combines it into a single view. Teams then use the analytics to determine how their marketing initiatives are performing and to identify opportunities for improvement. It is difficult to determine the effectiveness and return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns without marketing analytics.

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. According to a survey of senior marketing executives published in the Harvard Business Review, “more than 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI.”

Characteristics of Marketing Analytics

1. Ensure high-quality data

Your analytics rest on your data. That means you need a tool that mines both structured and unstructured customer data from all possible sources, including various interactions and touch points.

2. Get real-time insights

Your marketing analytics solution also needs to deliver real-time insights to you. You can’t be effective if your information is out-of-date; tracking the right metrics at the right time is key.

3. Perfect your dashboard

While it may be tempting to track as many metrics as possible, your analytics will not be as useful if you do. Rather, define your goals and measure results for the use cases most important to you.

4. Choose the right analytics visualization

Marketing teams and stakeholders must be able to make something of the data if you are to gain meaningful insights from it. The key is to choose the most appropriate data visualizations so you can find patterns and interpret the data. Thus, you must choose a marketing analytics solution that allows you to choose or customize your visualizations instead of using default charts for displaying data.

5. Use a tool featuring machine learning and AI to predict and prescribe

Marketing must be real-time and predictive to be effective today. You must be able to make accurate predictions, analyze the data, and make data-driven decisions to enhance each step of the customer journey.