Digital marketing analytics, or marketing analytics, are the processes of measuring marketing program performance and value. For most organizations, this involves collecting data from multiple sources and using marketing analytics platforms. Ultimately, marketing data analytics help you determine how your marketing initiatives are performing and identify opportunities.
The primacy of online marketing and the evolution of MarTech means marketing data now comes from various sources, including apps, on-demand services, and the mobile web — all spaces marketers can reach and engage consumers. Analyzing marketing data involves unifying and understanding this data in aggregate and at the source, channel, campaign, assets, and customer levels to develop robust and actionable insights.
Benefits of Digital Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics helps you evaluate the efficacy and return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns and to plan for new and updated programs. Marketing analytics can also:
- Show the value of your marketing campaigns to leadership and the broader organization, justifying decisions, budgets, and plans
- Help you forecast performance for your sales teams
- Inform your marketing messaging, including how and where to best reach your customers
- Provide direction for product development, mitigating risk by delivering new and improved products and services based on customer insights
Standard Metrics for Digital Marketing Analytics
Digital marketing analytics is dependent on the collection of data pertaining to customer interaction with your campaigns across channels. The data, or metrics, most commonly collected by marketers are typically related to how customers interact with campaigns via your website, emails, and apps.
Metrics for Websites
Visitor or user: someone who visits your website
Page view:a load of a page of your website
Session: the activities a visitor engages in while on your website
Traffic: the total number of visits to your website or a page on your website for a specific period. Traffic can be segmented and analyzed based on demographic information, referring channel (including organic, i.e., from a search engine results page), and type of device used by the visitor
Time on page: the average amount of time visitors spend on your website or page
Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who load a page on your website but fail to take any additional action, including viewing another page
Click-through rate: the percentage of visitors who click on a page’s call-to-action (CTA)
Conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who complete an intended action, such as a form submission
Metrics for Marketing Email Campaigns
Open rate: the percentage of emails opened by recipients
Unsubscribe rate: the percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from future marketing emails from you
Metrics for Social Media
Engagement rate: the percentage of users who interact with a social media post — comments, likes, etc.
Follows/subscribes: the number of users who subscribe to your media account
Shares: the number of times a webpage or social media post is shared by users on social media
Cloud Data Platforms and Digital Marketing Analytics
Unifying data streams from multiple channels — websites, social media, and emails — requires a data warehousing solution that can address the complexity, volume, variety, and frequency of data generated today. The advantages of a cloud data platform include:
Unified data sets, as a cloud data platform provides a centralized location to unify access (in real-time) disparate data, along with the centralized computing power needed to do so
Unified reporting, with all data combined in one cloud-based architecture so it can be analyzed and viewed holistically in the moment, instead of after the fact
Easier management by keeping all data on one cloud data platform for faster queries and retrievals and infinite capacity to avoid overloads and slowdowns
Seamless sharing with no need to download, compress, and transfer data peer-to-peer via FTP, email, or file-sharing software, each of which has significant limitations
Lower costs, as a cloud data platform allows you to scale up or down without long-term contract commitments.
Snowflake and Digital Marketing Analytics
Snowflake's platform provides a comprehensive solution for data consolidation and analysis. Its ability to integrate all customer and marketing data, from internal and external sources, facilitates an omnichannel or Customer 360 view, which is crucial for executing successful marketing campaigns.
Snowflake streamlines digital marketing analytics by integrating customer data from various sources, enabling a holistic view essential for effective campaigns. Recent enhancements, such as Generative Marketing in partnership with GrowthLoop, have introduced AI-driven capabilities for audience building, journey planning, and content creation. This integration allows for quicker, data-informed decisions and more efficient campaign orchestration.
With tools for Measurement and Attribution, Marketing Analytics, and ML-Driven Pipeline Forecasting, Snowflake supports both customer data platforms and marketing analytics infrastructure. This approach aids marketers in delivering more relevant and personalized offers, driving customer engagement and improving campaign outcomes.