What Is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is the use of software and other tools to measure the effectiveness of a campaign based on relevant data. Marketing analytics help businesses to better optimize their marketing ROI by making highly data-driven decisions about spending, messaging, audience targeting, and other crucial factors.

There are many kinds of marketing analytics data, some of which can be tracked in real time or near real-time. While these metrics may vary by business or industry, common examples of marketing data include social media activity, CRM data, industry benchmarks, past campaign performance, website behavior, and many more. Marketing analytics software is also the backbone of performance-based marketing and advertising, which refer to paid campaigns where the ad buy or marketing spend is explicitly based on quantifiable outcomes.

Without marketing analytics, businesses can’t efficiently measure either the performance of their marketing activities or their marketing ROI. In the digital age, ignoring your marketing data is akin to throwing darts with a blindfold on. You might get lucky, but you’re likely to miss the target more often than not. Data-driven marketing allows for much more granular, targeted campaigns that produce measurable results. You can repeat and optimize what works and learn from what doesn’t produce its intended results.