Marketing Analytics vs Web Analytics: 3 Features that Set Marketing Analytics Apart

Data-driven decision making can set your business apart from the rest. When it comes to knowing what marketing channel is the most effective, we have to make sure we have the right data. In this video, I’ll share the 3 features that set marketing analytics apart web analytics. 

Video Transcript: 

Hey, what’s up? Welcome to Hack My Growth. In this episode, we’re going to be distinguishing the differences between web analytics and marketing analytics. All right, let’s go. Are you looking to grow your business, but you’re not sure where to start? That’s where we come in.

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So, like I said in the introduction, we’re going to be talking about the differences between web analytics and marketing analytics. Now, both of these, as you can see, fall under digital analytics, but they have very distinct purposes, and their focuses are slightly different. A lot of businesses are using web analytics.

This is usually Google Analytics for most companies, and web analytics is a very powerful way to look at your page-level behavior and your website behavior. These are things like your traffic and the sources of that traffic, bounce rates, and percent of new visits, but again, everything inside the web analytics is focused at the page level. Yes, we do use some user data, you can do a lot of cool things, like interests or demographics, but the reality is you’re still looking at how those groups, or those user sets, those anonymous users, are interacting with a specific page, and how they’re moving from page to page.

But again, the biggest part of this is page-level metrics. Now, marketing metrics are different than that. It’s looking at the metrics that are coming from all your different digital platforms. This is not only your website but your lead generation programs, so your email marketing, your ads, and your social media connections.

It’s going to be looking at those types of metrics, and these are coming from a number of different platforms, and what we do is focus more now on the lead level or the person level. So web analytics is focused on pages and marketing analytics is focused on people. Now, as you can see, if you rely on web analytics, you’re going to get stuck because you’re not going to know exactly what you’re doing across all your marketing channels. How are your social ads performing? How are your Google ads performing? How’s your email engagement? How is your native or your natural social, your organic, engagement with people going? And what are they doing?

Are they taking those next steps with you? Are they engaging with your business? Are they buying your product? Are they moving along the funnel? These are the things that you want to be able to understand, and the only way you’re going to do that is with marketing metrics. So what are the three core elements that separate marketing metrics?

Let’s get into that. The first thing is you need to have integration across all your channels. You need to be able to integrate email, social, organic, between paid, and understand how each one of those is working and how your leads are engaging with it. This is why a lot of people like to use these all-in-one platforms. Again, we do a lot of content here on HubSpot.

HubSpot is a great solution for integrating these different channels and allowing you to see holistically how these channels are performing, as well as from lead engagement all the way through the customer funnel and to whose closing the most customers.

So the first step, it needs to integrate across all your digital channels. Another feature of marketing analytics is it’s people-centric. As we talked about before, it’s not focused on the page level. It’s focused on the person. How is the person moving through the funnel? What action did they take? What was their next step? How did they engage with you? How did they find you in the first place? Are they moving along the funnel?

And the third feature of marketing analytics is closed-loop reporting. You’re not going to be able to get closed-loop reporting if you’re relying on web analytics because you need to understand the person, how that person came into your business, the steps that they took, and did they close. A lot of times, we’ll see companies that come in that are using web analytics, and they’re looking at their sources and saying, “We’re getting so much traffic from LinkedIn. We need to focus there.”

And LinkedIn is a great source, so I’m not saying this is what’s happening all the time, but if you dig down into the marketing data, which they haven’t been paying as much attention to, you’ll see LinkedIn is creating a lot of leads, but those leads aren’t qualified to buy their product. So they’re getting a lot of this top-of-the-funnel attention, but it’s noise because those aren’t the people who are closing.

And then you could pull out another segment and say, “Okay, well, this is what we’re doing in Google ads, and these are the people we’re targeting, and John Smith say this ad, took this action and became a customer.” So with the marketing metrics, we’re allowed to see how somebody’s moved all the way through the funnel, and then we could calculate the cost, not only per lead, but also cost per acquisition, and understand how the impact of that is being made on our business, and whether we’re investing in the right channels to drive new customers.

Marketing metrics is a very, very powerful tool, and it doesn’t have to be complex. Again, there are a number of great tools out there. HubSpot just actually opened up their email tool. You can get a thousand emails a month through the tool now for free. So I highly recommend you check out something like that. HubSpot is free to get started. That’s a really great one.

There are plenty of other ones you could check out as well, but at least it allows you to start understanding some marketing metrics and starting to track individual people through the funnel. And then, when you layer that on with how they act with your website, you can make some website optimizations as well. So this was the difference between web analytics and marketing analytics. If you’ve got any questions, please comment below, and thanks again for watching. And as always, Happy Marketing.