The Importance of Marketing Analytics

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The Importance of Marketing Analytics Posted: 26 Nov 2012 06:47 PM PST Posted by JoannaLord Analytics is one of those words: it gets used correctly for the most part, but often gets used as a catchall. As marketers, we understand the importance of having web analytics set up, of having an analyst on staff, and of constantly working with the data as a part of our daily practice. We spend a significant amount of time focused on site metrics and web analytics reports. We have a great sense of how our sites are performing technically, and how that backs out to money made. But what if web analytics aren't enough? Over the last few months, we’ve seen the rise of an equally important piece to the puzzle — marketing analytics — and I'd like to take some time and to explain what it is and how it can help all of us be more effective marketers. So, what is Marketing Analytics? Marketing analytics is the measurement and optimization of your marketing activities. Rather than focusing only on your site’s performance like you do with web analytics, you focus on how your marketing efforts are performing, and adjust them accordingly. Marketing analytics goes beyond on-site indicators and leans on other tools, offsite metrics, and even offline efforts. It takes a whole-picture approach to the measurement of your marketing. The concept seems simple — and somewhat assumed — but many marketers spend hours in web analytics tools like Google Analytics and Omniture, looking at the outcome of their efforts as it relates to site performance, but don't go any further than that. But what about analyzing the way you executed that campaign? What about the time of day you did things, or the vehicles you used? What about the conversations offsite, and the engagement in real life that resulted from those efforts? Marketing analytics is the act of looking past mere website results, and asking yourself, "How did that marketing campaign really go?" Marketing analytics helps us see how everything plays off each other, and decide how we might want to invest moving forward. Re-prioritizing how you spend your time, how you build out your team, and the resources you invest in channels and efforts are critical steps to achieving marketing team success. How do I get started with Marketing Analytics? Like many new approaches to analytics, there is a learning curve. There will need to be some up-front explanation and defining. We wanted to break down the parts of marketing analytics and leave you with some kick-off questions to get started with.  1. How are your marketing activities performing? This is the piece that most marketers have down pat. This is all about how are you performing right now. How are your current efforts paying off? If you focus solely on web analytics, you may find yourself focusing too narrowly on your site's results. With marketing analytics, you'll take a wide angle view. Rather than simply reporting your visitor counts, time on site, and conversions, what about reporting more? What about the results that happened offsite? What about the less traditional KPI-driven results like conversations, comments, and shares? In addition to reporting more metrics, we should also be reporting them in a way that speaks to the entire team and the company at large. If you want to change how your company invests their marketing resources, you need to make a strong case for analyzing what is happening beyond your site, and to go beyond cookie cutter KPIs and report formats. Here are a few examples of common web analytics performance KPIs (on the left) and then a contrasting list of marketing analytics KPIs (on the right). You can see how the list doesn't just grow in size, but requires us to use many tools, compile our own reports, and work to tell a story with the data. Marketing analytics goes beyond traditional website KPIs. We find more of the metrics we care about tend to be people-centered: how are we doing our best job for both current visitors/customers and for future ones? How are our fans, friends, and followers engaging with us? Who's talking about our brand on other sites? We track metrics that help us use our time in the most valuable way possible, and we work to know exactly how our marketing activities are doing for us. 2. Where are your competitors investing time and resources? Competitive analysis, you so funny. It's one of those things that all marketers know is important, but so many of us fail to carve out dedicated time for it. Marketing analytics assumes that competitive research is an ongoing, fluid effort. It shouldn't be something we do at the beginning of a project or when we take on a new client. It should be a constant metric we are aware of — and one we know as well as we do our own. In addition to performance, we need to be aware of where they are putting their time. What are they testing? What are they investing in? This requires we jump out of our software and tools and become observers. Are they engaging more on certain networks? Are they pushing more money into content marketing? Are they investing heavily into channels that you may or may not be in?  This competitive layer adds color to your performance research. Now you know where you stand, where they stand, and you have a better sense of where things are going. This helps you invest in the right efforts, and possibly pull back from others.   3. How do your marketing activities perform in the long-term? We understand the importance of knowing if we have improved week over week, and month over month, but too often we stop at that. There are so many other things to be watching closely when tracking success. How about the momentum of those gains and losses? What about the long-term quality of those gains and losses? How do those short-term wins turn into loyalty and ongoing engagement? Marketing analytics focuses more on the overall performance of our efforts, and the many ways we can single them out to improve them. Imagine planning your marketing roadmap around yesterday's results only, or your site's performance only. Scary, huh? We agree. Now imagine planning a marketing roadmap around how each channel has done over time, and how your specific efforts returned across all the objectives you care about (money, engagement, loyalty, etc.) — that sounds way better. If you take the time up front to map that movement out, you will make more holistic decisions about where to invest your energy. Here are some great additional questions to ask when working to understand how your activities are returning:   4. How does your marketing analytics data inform your next decision? We all understand the premise that we need to invest where things are returning well. This is most commonly applied in performance marketing, but all of our marketing efforts demand the same closing of the loop. Marketing analytics can help us close the loop as it relates to our marketing efforts and investments. Instead of assuming some channels always work — or that some channels are never going to work — you should be testing where and how you spend your time, and prioritizing next quarter’s investments accordingly. This is most easily applied when it comes to staffing and budget spend, but what about time spent on researching new tools, new processes, creating new tests, and designs? Are you giving your time to the right channels? Marketing analytics helps us get to the bottom of that, and because of it you can make your next move a fully informed one. Common mistakes with Marketing Analytics There are quite a few common challenges people face when trying to invest in marketing analytics. Here are a few we've found, and tips on how to avoid them. Set it and forget it dilemma: We've all done it. You hear about this new cool analytics tool. You set it up and start collecting data, but you never quite circle back to see how things are going and what it's telling you. Or, worse yet, we receive weekly reports sent to us but we fail to interpret the data for valuable insights. It's the "set it and forget it" dilemma. Marketing analytics expects more. To do it well, you need to be testing both new channels and new tools to track their success — then set aside time to dive into the data. A key piece to successful marketing analytics is to be proactive and constantly pushing the limits on the process behind your decisions. It takes time. Marketers are strapped for time, but this is time well spent. Thinking it’s a CMO's job: A common misconception around deciding how to grow a marketing program is to think it's solely the CMO's job to do so. Instead, we should look at it as every marketer's responsibility to know how their efforts are returning and what to do next. This should back out to a roadmap for your channel or job responsibilities. If you leave it to the top of the organization, you often get a very disconnected roadmap. It should be a joint conversation.   Failing to evangelize the wins and losses: One of the most common mistakes we fast-moving, highly caffeinated marketers make is failing to evangelize the results of our efforts. To make marketing analytics part of your team's culture and place it in the forefront of your company's mind, you need to be sharing how things are going on a regular basis. Rather than tell them you "use inbound marketing to attract community members," you can talk about the specific campaigns, content pieces, and efforts. Show them which ones are working, and which ones need work. Ask for ideas and feedback. By getting them involved, they will be more invested in seeing it succeed.   In conclusion: you need both While we think marketing analytics is critical for a successful marketing program, we aren’t saying it should replace your web analytics. Quite the opposite, actually. We think it’s the combination of the two that set a team up to succeed. If you spend time analyzing both your site’s performance and your efforts' performance you will have the full picture: What is working? What needs help? What demands a pivot? We’ve already seen more tools and resources pop up to help marketers really understand how their efforts are affecting the full picture. I think the next year will bring even more into the space. Many marketers are already looking at the big view marketing analytics provides today, albeit without dedicated tools that provide all of this functionality. For most marketers, the task is a manual one that requires multiple tools to get the full view — but it's worth it. As marketing teams continue to grow in size, and marketers wear more and more hats, we think more people will demand mature tools that make it easy to document a game plan. Rather that navigate that landscape based solely on conversions or other secondary metrics, there will be a demand for a more holistic approach to help us understand how we are doing, and where we should be doing more.  I’m excited to see marketing analytics continue to evolve, and to see how tools develop to make it a smoother, more repeatable process — and I'm super excited to see how that can help us all be more efficient, successful marketers. I’d love to hear how you are applying this form of analysis, and what tools you use to help dictate where to invest your time and resources. Please leave comments and thoughts below! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Link Building for the Little Guys Posted: 26 Nov 2012 04:26 AM PST Posted by Matthew Barby This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. As part of a small business, I always find it very frustrating when I read articles about the ‘best ways to build links to your website’. The same things seem to appear each time: create an infographic, get a video to go viral, write an ebook that people can download, produce some white papers, etc. Now, I’m not saying that these methods don’t work, because they are completely legitimate ways of building links. What I get frustrated about is that if you are a business with very low influence and you create this type of new, unique content, it can be quite a struggle to get it in front of those you wish to see it. With this in mind, I thought I would share the methods that I have found to be most effective for all us ‘little guys’. [image credit: www.telegraph.co.uk] Forget Link-Building, Think Relationship-Building After spending a lot of time trying a whole host of different techniques to build that ‘perfect link’, one thing that started to dawn on me was that even if I were to create the greatest bit of content that anyone has ever seen, if I didn’t have a way of getting it in front of people then it would be useless. On top of this, it is very rare that you will be able to continually create the greatest bit of content that anyone has ever seen. The solution? Focus on building relationships with more influential users within social networks. As part of my day, I dedicate at least an hour to trawling through content from within the search industry, commenting on articles that I like through the likes of Google+, Twitter, etc, and following new users that share interesting content that isn’t just self-promotion. Alongside this I make sure that I keep all of my RSS feeds organised within Google Reader. This allows me to see when new articles that might interest me are published, without having to take too much time out of my schedule. This kind of basic organisation can not only save you a lot of time, but it will help to give your social following some new, interesting content on a regular basis. One of the best articles that I have read this year was from Pak Hou Cheung and it described how to leverage Google reader for guest post opportunities and blogger outreach. Give it a read and I guarantee it will improve your daily productivity two-fold. Make the Right Relationships The next hurdle I found was that, actually, it’s not always that easy to become best buddies with the likes of Rand Fishkin, Will Critchlow and AJ Kohn, just by sharing their blog on Google+ and telling them what you liked about it! When looking to build relationships, it is important to build them with the right people at the right time. What I mean by this is that if you are yet to really make your mark in the industry with your content, then it would be a much more effective use of your time to build relationships with those who would gain a mutual benefit from it. Whenever I create content I always ask the question: why would anyone benefit from sharing it? If the answer is that they probably wouldn’t gain anything, then you need to re-think the content that you are producing. Start off small; build relationships with bloggers that have relatively low influence, but build much more of them. Look for blogs with less activity on them, where the bloggers are in a similar situation to you and would be really happy if you shared their content or linked back to it. I’m not saying that Rand, Will and AJ wouldn’t be really happy if I shared their content, but I don’t think they’d struggle if I didn’t. So Why Would Anyone Benefit From Sharing My Content? One of the most effective ways of encouraging people to share your content is by promoting their content and adding value to it. One very simple method we use at Wow Internet is to create a weekly ‘Search Engine News Roundup’. This involves taking 5 articles that we found particularly useful from within the search industry and giving them a short write up, with a link back to each of the respective blogs. We always try to make sure that we source articles from different authors every week and find articles that aren’t exclusively from hugely popular blogs. Once we have done this, I contact each of the authors through Google+, mention them in a tweet about our blog and send them an email (if I have the author’s email address, which is usually available on their blog). Another little trick that we use is placing a custom Tweet button next to the link of each article that we have featured in the ‘Search Engine News Roundup’. The custom Tweet button includes a link to the featured blog, a brief message about the article, the original author’s Twitter handle and the Wow Internet Twitter handle (so that the author knows it has been shared from our blog). Below is an example Tweet that comes from the button: “Great blog from @justincutroni talking about the Next Generation of Google Analytics - http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/10/29/universal-analytics-the-next-generation-of-google-analytics/ via @wow_internet” You may notice that there is no link back to our blog here. The reason for this is that the whole focus is around promoting the content of others, in order to build relationships and give the author a reason to want to subsequently share our content. This will help drive social signals to the featured article, which will give the author another answer to ‘Why it would benefit me to share their content?’ The key message that I am trying to get across is that you need to add value to the content that you are sharing. By doing this we are able to reach a wider audience with our content, which can increase the social signals going back to our site and could also persuade people to bookmark our blog, in order to view our future content. This is the most valuable thing for me, because it means that any content that I produce in the future will have a greater level of exposure. Another very effective way of getting more worth out of the links built to your website is by boosting the authority of webpages that link to you. This is a tactic that I’m sure many of you use on a regular basis. If I am linking to someone else’s content it would make sense for them to think about linking back to me in order to boost the power of the link that I have given them. Through linking to others’ material it will increase the likelihood that they will then share your content in order to boost the power of the link they have received, which works brilliant for both parties involved. A True Story Around a couple of months ago Larry Kim posted a fantastic blog on SEOmoz, which showcased his company’s (WordStream) keyword analysis software. Within the blog, Larry offered a free one-year trial of the software to anyone that dropped him an email requesting it. Being a lover of bargains and on the lookout for new tools that can benefit our client’s SEO performance, I took Larry up on the offer. When I got a message back from Larry himself arranging for an activation key to be sent over, I suddenly had a brain-wave… Larry’s objective for his blog is clear: he wanted to get more people from within the SEO industry signed up to use his product and generate awareness for the brand in general. The question I then asked was, how can I add value to what Larry is trying to achieve, in a way that would also benefit my own objectives? I started using the keyword analysis suite from WordStream and really liked it. It dramatically improved the way in which we could carry out keyword analysis for our clients and gave us an extra resource to utilise. After using the software I made it a priority to share my positive experience with my followers, and what better way to do this than to blog about it? In order to get Larry’s attention I knew that I needed to add value to what he was trying to achieve, in a way that would appeal to his target audience. So I decided to write an article titled ‘Improving Your Keyword Analysis With WordStream’. In the article I discussed the features I like most and how they can be used specifically to improve the keyword analysis process of any given SEO campaign. I made sure that I linked back to Larry and added in a few particularly ‘quotable’ lines (I will explain this shortly). My next step was to get in touch with Larry. I dropped him an email to tell him about the blog and how much I enjoyed the keyword research suite. I then asked if he would be kind enough to share the article with his social following. Then I fired it across to all of my social following, making sure to tag Larry in the posts. Shortly after I received this email back from Larry: Hi Matt, Thanks for writing this up. I’ve tweeted it, submitted to inbound.org: http://inbound.org/seo/2012/09/improving-your-keyword-analysis-with-wordstream-wow-internet-blog/ and shared on my facebook and google+ page. I’ve asked the people who do our company social stuff to share as well. Thanks again! Larry Before I wrote the blog I had checked out the WordStream website to see if there would be any kind of opportunity for me to get something more solid than just the article shared by Larry. What I found was a testimonials page that was populated by only a handful of companies, including the likes of Search Engine Land. I spotted this as a potential link target for the Wow Internet website. This is where the quotable part of the blog came in handy! I replied to Larry’s email to let him know that I would be more than happy for him to use any part of the blog as a review for his product, which could be displayed on his website. It turned out that I was in luck, because he was more than happy to do it. In fact, when you think about it this was incredibly beneficial for both of us; I get a link from a high authority page back to our domain and Larry gets a credible review of his product, from a company within the industry he is trying to target. Not only did Larry link to our homepage, but he also linked to a couple of our inside pages with some very good anchor text indeed. Thanks again Larry! You can see it for yourself here: http://www.wordstream.com/reviews The moral of the story here is to understand exactly how you can bring value to the people that you reach out to. Only once you have understood how you can benefit them, should you even consider how they can benefit you. Final Tip: Keep At It. The last bit of advice I would give is to simply keep at it. This kind of link building can be very frustrating, as I’m sure you have realised, but hopefully these kinds of small success stories will inspire all you little guys out there to keep trying! I hope this has been helpful to some of you out there and I would love to hear any of you feedback (both negative and positive, but please be nice!). Oh, and sharing this to your social following would be a great help ;-) Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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