Without marketing analytics, “we are all blind and deaf wandering out on the web like a deer on a freeway”. Geoffery Moore quite aptly sums up why the world is going crazy over data and analytics. Data is big but the potential impact of analytics is huge.
In our space, over the past few years, we have witnessed the meteoric rise of marketing and advertising analytics. As the digital landscape becomes the new marketplace, marketers have to navigate a new world that is vaster and more intense than ever before.
It is becoming harder for brands to connect with their target market. Winning them over is an even greater challenge. And marketing analytics could be the secret ingredient for success.
The Salesforce’s Digital Advertising 2020 Report suggests that 94% of advertisers rely on a broad base of CRM data, from transactions and contact information to brand preferences, to track advertising effectiveness. It is also estimated that by “2019 66% of digital advertising spend will go to Google Search, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.” 47% of the advertisers in North America are also looking to increase their use of third-party data in the next year to “gain more inputs into decision-making, ad targeting, and ad effectiveness”.
Clearly, marketing and advertising analytics are powerful weapons to connect with today’s customer in meaningful ways. And for agencies that want to deliver more bang for their client, this becomes a powerful arrow in the quiver as well. But how does analytics work? Here’s how.
Audience extension
A big part of advertising success depends on finding the right target market. But how do you know if your audience pool is right? How do you know if it is big enough? Marketing analytics helps you not only find your audience but also ensures that you can extend your influence into third-party sites. The benefit? Increased reach and the real possibility of scaling your ad campaign.
With such integrations into first and third-party data, you can access an audience that is uniquely yours. You also get the capability to gain a deeper understanding of this TG. This helps you connect with them better and drive value.
Optimized bidding
The advertising route is anything but cheap. You need to make sure that you get complete control, flexibility and transparency with your own bids to drive impactful outcomes for your client campaigns. A comprehensive ad analytics platform helps you manage all your ad trade demands from a single platform and capably connects your brand to its target market.
Marketing analytics also gives you the advantage of optimizing your bidding strategies so that you can predict win-rates and win prices. The benefit? More bang for your buck
Success measurement
Each industry is different. Every business is different. Its target market is different. With so many variables at play, how do you identify the best way to reach your audience? Unless you target your marketing strategies and campaigns to the right audience, aren’t you just preparing yourself for a wasted campaign?
With an advanced ad analytics platform, you get the flexibility of platform customization that suits your brand and its campaign-specific needs and goals. All this, while being market-focused and while taking the competition into account.
Planning effectiveness
“A goal without a plan is only a wish”. This is truer today than it ever was. Globalization and an ever-changing market inject continuous dynamism into the landscape of choices -for you as an agency and for your target customer too.
A great ad analytics platform will support you in this critical choice as well. Leveraging predictive planning tools, you can build, deliver and analyses your media campaigns proactively. This approach will help you define and track your goals better. That, in turn, will help you reach your planning goals faster, more effectively and with less effort.
Greater control over outcomes
Does it not make sense to factor in the randomness of business and shifts in the marketplace when making ad decisions?
Advanced ad analytics will give you the heuristics advantage.This will help you optimize your ad investments and increase your conversion rates. Heuristics disaggregate each relevant touch point into its component parts. This accounts for the details that matter like the quality of engagement, the number of target customers reached effectively, the cost per unique touch, etc.
Heuristics comes to the aid of marketers especially when they are playing with limited volumes of data, when the rate of spending is relatively constant and when marginal investments are hard to isolate (as is the case with always-on digital media).
Better audience targeting and retargeting.
You only have a finite budget for your client. Wouldn’t you want to extend this budget to achieve more?
Proper targeting and then retargeting are now the hallmarks of good digital advertising. Marketing analytics helps to achieve this in innovative ways. Take for instance location-specific campaigns. Using the power of analytics, you can enable better geofencing. Geofencing helps in delivering the right message at the right time.
The same applies online too. Retargeting allows you to ‘follow; your audience all over the web. With this information, you can decide where to serve your ads. Retargeting also helps you create better and customized experiences for the customers who are further down the purchase path.
Clearly, it’s the smart choice to use analytics to get more juice out of your clients’ advertising dollars. But we agree that marketers need a tool that will help them achieve all this easily. Analytics tools for agencies must be user-friendly. They must deliver insights in a language that its users, the marketers, will understand. It should allow marketers to execute better and execute fast. There’s always pressure to demonstrate ROI to your clients. Isn’t it time to make things easier by leveraging analyticsto stretch that budget buck that another mile?
