Historically, making educated choices has meant relying on instincts, gut intuition and perhaps an incomplete collection of snapshots describing how certain tactics or channels have performed recently. Whether you’re a start-up motivated to maximize the distance of every marketing dollar or an established company with a robust marketing department, but multiple stakeholders scrutinizing your budget, are you truly comfortable carving out a path forward based on speculation?

Here is where marketing analytics bridge the gap between the intimidating scope of marketing measurement and the freedom to make confident, data-driven decisions.

What do marketing analytics entail?

Conventional wisdom perpetuates the notion that marketing analytics are synonymous with website traffic, click-through rates (CTRs) and trade-show leads. However, each metric is a barometer through which to assess the health of campaigns or channels within a defined time period.

Instead, marketing analytics is a holistic process, outlined in Figure 1. Precise objectives dictate corresponding metrics and the resulting data is analyzed before a course of action is determined and optimized over time.¹