Using Analytics in Advertising to Optimize Marketing Results
Today’s marketing teams are tasked with continually honing their advertising campaigns to optimize performance. Because the modern buyer’s journey is complex, involving many different touchpoints and channels, it’s impossible to achieve optimal results when relying on guesswork. Data is now crucial to the success of any marketing initiative. Let’s explore the benefits of using data analytics in advertising, the challenges involved, and how today’s marketers are overcoming the challenges to achieve greater results from their advertising campaigns.
What Is Analytics in Advertising?
Advertising analytics involves using data generated by various sources to measure campaign performance and identify new opportunities for advertising initiatives. These sources includes websites, social channels, software applications, mobile devices, and third-party data sources. With data analytics, you can improve attribution, campaign optimization, and resource allocation.
Attribution: Improve attribution by tracking the customer journey and identifying each touchpoint that a customer encountered along the path to purchase. With a better understanding of how activities and channels worked together to nurture a customer, you can make more-informed decisions when planning future campaigns.
Campaign optimization: Optimize campaign performance by measuring and testing various elements of a campaign, including messaging, ad layout, and calls to action. With cohort analysis, you can uncover commonalities and patterns in customer behavior and use those insights to hone campaigns. “What-if” analysis can be used to evaluate likely outcomes of various actions so you can better identify how to improve campaigns.
Resource allocation: Analytics can reveal how to optimize resource allocation such as ad spend. You can determine which channels to invest more in and which to cut back on. You can also better identify what is likely to happen based on a variety of different variables and iterate accordingly. Additionally, analytics can help you reduce customer acquisition cost.
Benefits of Using Analytics in Advertising
Now let’s look at several specific benefits of using data analytics in advertising.
Provides a 360-degree view of the customer journey
With a unified view of all the interactions a customer has had with your company, you can better understand customer needs and desires. By evaluating website activity, social media engagement, chat activity, and so on, you can also better understand the path to purchase.
Delivers insights for targeting the ideal audience
Marketing analytics also allows you to see which customers contribute the highest percentage of revenue in any given period, which have the highest lifetime value, and which consistently share positive word-of-mouth for your brand. With this information, you can identify the characteristics your best customers have in common and then target audiences that also have these shared characteristics. You can target segments based on cost-to-acquire, highest lifetime value, and other meaningful metrics.
Enables better personalization
Today’s buyers (both consumer and business buyers) expect marketers to approach them with highly relevant offers and messaging. Using insights from data analytics, you can create a more personalized customer journey that’s precisely designed for each segment you approach. You can have confidence that you’re sending the right message via the right channel at the right time to optimize campaign performance.
Allows you to iterate more effectively
With analytics, you can precisely measure campaign performance and evaluate different options to optimize performance across each of your marketing channels. Analytics enables you to identify opportunities for improvement in real time and iterate, even while campaigns are actively running.
Increases forecast accuracy
Forecasts are notoriously challenging for marketing teams because there are so many variables involved in campaign performance. But with advertising analytics, you can not only measure past performance but also make more-accurate future predictions. Scenario modeling helps you to identify likely outcomes based on various impacts on a campaign. You’ll be able to more accurately forecast lead volume and conversion rates and understand what actions you need to take as a result.
Improves ROI
By analyzing the performance of each channel and platform—including social media, email, websites, smart TV, and direct marketing—you can identify which are performing best for any given market segment and customer journey point. Based on this data, you can reallocate spend and improve ROI.
Challenges for Using Analytics in Advertising
The benefits of using data analytics in marketing and advertising aren’t easily won. Several challenges prevent today’s teams from getting the full value out of their data.
The complexity of omnichannel marketing
The customer journey is no longer linear. Marketers must continually flex to meet the demands of the constantly shifting omnichannel ecosystem. This complexity can be intimidating without the right tools to empower teams to get the insights they need, when they need them.
The data explosion
The many marketing and advertising channels and platforms involved in omnichannel marketing generate a multitude of data in a variety of different formats. This data can be extremely difficult to wrangle without a powerful data platform that provides an elastic infrastructure, unlimited scale, risk mitigation, and security management (such as the Snowflake Data Cloud). This leads to the next challenge: siloed data.
Siloed data
Marketing and advertising data is stored across dozens of SaaS applications, websites, devices, ad platforms, social platforms, and so on. Without a data platform designed for the demands of modern advertising analytics that can bring all this data into a central location, marketers can’t get a holistic view of their data. Additionally, siloed data tends to suffer quality issues due to inconsistencies in overlapping data. Marketers need a single source of truth before they can benefit from analytics.
Snowflake for Actionable Advertising Analytics
The Snowflake Media Data Cloud eliminates data silos to establish a single source of truth across products, channels, engagement, and advertising. With these insights, you can drive greater personalization, make better content decisions, and improve experiences while ensuring strict data privacy and security.
Achieve a customer 360
Snowflake allows you to generate a holistic view of your customer and the buyer’s journey to power smarter decision-making. Additionally, you can easily conduct continuous marketing analytics in real time to understand which engagements across every channel are driving the greatest impact.
Optimize campaign performance
With Snowflake’s powerful capabilities, you can improve the effectiveness of predictive models and analytics, from search keyword bidding to lead scoring, leading to smarter media buying and superior sales performance.
Improve ROI and attribution
Thanks to Snowflake’s speed, you can eliminate delays and determine attribution of in-flight campaigns to change or double down on tactics in real time. Easily integrate marketing data seamlessly across web analytics, SEO, digital, social, and other platforms to identify the highest performing channels and touchpoints to increase return on marketing investment.
Better Advertising Analytics = Better Performance
Armed with relevant, quality data stored in a centralized location for ease of analysis, your marketing team can more effectively analyze your advertising data for the insights you need. By relying on data, not guesswork, you can improve not only your analytics game but also your team’s performance.
To see Snowflake’s marketing data capabilities first hand, sign up for a free trial.