Although both are imperative to your business, web analytics and marketing analytics are not the same thing. They each measure important aspects of your campaigns and strategies, but it’s important to know the distinction to create informed reports and decisions.
Web analytics measure things like load times, page views per visit and overall time on your site. These web-specific numbers can be valuable for marketing insight, but they only tell part of the story.
Marketing Analytics Tell a Broad Story
Marketing analytics measure things like traffic, leads, sales, events, and conversations. In other words, marketing analytics take into account everything from creating new leads to closing sales – and can include both offline and online metrics.
A marketing analytics package or report should offer you a wider picture than a web-only solution or viewpoint.
Marketing and sales analytics are the next step in knowing and getting the big picture of your website and business. With marketing analytics, marketers can truly understand how well their marketing efforts are paying off, not just how well their website is functioning.
Analytics Breakdown
Marketing & Sales Analytics
With marketing and sales analytics you will better be able to:
- Determine channel specific ROI
- Understand how well you are achieving business goals
- Diagnose deficiencies in your marketing plan and strategy
- Make adjustments to strategies based on analytics reported on
- Monitor brand mentions
- Track sign-ups from forms on site
- Calculate money save/earned per campaign
Web Analytics
With web analytics you will be able to determine things like:
- Number of visitors
- Number of page views
- Time on site
- Bounce rate
- Conversions
- Site performance
- Page load times
Marketers Love Analytics
Marketing professionals need to know it all and be able to answer very important questions like:
- What personas are responding to your campaigns?
- What are they interested in after response?
- How often do leads turn to sales?
- Do certain persona segments convert better?
- What’s the typical sales cycle timeline?
- Why did someone respond?
Marketing has always been a tough place to assign real numbers and value. We know that marketing is valuable. It’s accepted. But there’s always a need to better justify marketing dollars, and better understand what marketing dollars return the best value.
The advances in technology over the last few 3-5 years have really made this easier to get the data you are looking for and easier to understand and digest it. It’s becoming easier every day to truly understand what marketing efforts bring in new customers and refine the way budgets are allocated.
Today’s marketing goes way beyond your website or your mail campaign or your TV ad. There are dozens of ways to reach consumers and you need to track and compare all of them to make the best use of your time and money.
It is a combination of what happens between your marketing channels and the outcome on the other side that truly gives you the greatest insight as a marketing professional.
Insights vs. Data
With a web platform like Google Analytics, you can tell how many people responded to a campaign. You can piece together a persona with browser info, location, time of day, and other metrics.
But you are limited beyond that. A true marketing analytics package offers you the ability to track those leads and responses beyond their initial conversion.
You can also easily integrate other channels – like direct mail and email marketing – and tie this information into one report.
Web performance metrics are very important, for your web marketing campaigns. But for the whole picture, you need analytics that cover the whole spectrum.
The Big Picture of Marketing Analytics
The truth of the matter is that both web analytics and marketing analytics are important and play a vital role in any business.
In fact- in my eyes, you really can’t have one set of analytics without the other. They are equally important, however marketing analytics is what puts it all together, giving you the big picture of what you need to see.
The real picture marketing analytics should paint is an intersection between what is happening across marketing channels and the outcome of those happenings. This means not focusing on things like page views, but instead prospects.
Putting it all together
Marketers and their analytics focus on the customer, aligning sales efforts and connecting multiple channels. This means Google Analytics is not simply the only answer. Full marketing analytics tools are needed to put all the pieces together and see the whole picture. Make sure your team is utilizing all the necessary resources to do so as well.
Final Thoughts: Marketing Analytics vs. Web Analytics
Instead of focusing on which is better or more important, focus on the fact that both marketing and web analytics play a vital role in your overall business reporting metrics. Use each for what they are intended for and you will do just fine.
If you are not an analytical person yourself, make sure you assign the appropriate people to manage your analytics for you. It is not something you want to guess at, it is an exact science and should be treated that way. The results you get from both the web and marketing side should be accurate as you base future decisions about your business on those same results.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley