A Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Data Management
Effective marketing begins with informed and strategic decisions. These decisions are guided by well-maintained and studied marketing analytics.
Marketing data can show you what’s working and what isn’t, helping you make better marketing decisions, ultimately increasing conversions and meeting business goals.
A major challenge for businesses is organizing, managing, and updating all the necessary data for each marketing campaign. However, the workflow becomes much easier once you establish a data system that works for you.
In this guide, we will go over the beginner’s basic marketing analytics for four different marketing campaigns your business might run, and how to track and manage the data for each of them.
We use Google Sheets (or Microsoft Excel) to track and monitor our analytics. You can find templates for each specific marketing campaign online, or make your own.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has become a leading strategy for many businesses. Posting content online can attract a lot of eyes to your businesses, and strengthen your brand awareness to a wide variety of customers.
The key to a successful social media marketing strategy is good content, consistency, organization, and analytics management.
At a minimum, the analytics you should monitor on your social media accounts are the following:
- Reach
- Interactions (comments, shares, likes)
- Follower growth
- Link and profile clicks
Meta Business Suite provides many useful tools to make posting content on Instagram and Facebook easier to manage. The ‘insights’ tab shows you the analytics for all of the metrics listed above for any time frame you choose. You can also track a variety of different analytics for each post individually.
Record and update your analytics on a weekly/bi-weekly basis.
Over enough time, you will gain insights on what content your target audience enjoys, and what needs to be improved. This information will help you make more informed content marketing decisions in the future.
SEO Analytics
Search engine optimization is a strategy utilized by businesses in order to increase their organic rankings on search results for Google and other web browsers.
If you decide to make SEO a part of your digital marketing strategy, which is recommended for any business that has a website or online presence, it is essential to monitor your growth through KPIs (key performance indicators).
There are plenty of ways to track the success of your SEO campaigns. The amount of data that exists for SEO is never-ending. Experts in the field spend the majority of their time compiling all of the available data and making informed and educated decisions based on their findings.
For this beginners guide, the most important SEO KPIs you should start tracking are:
- Keyword rankings
- Organic traffic
- Bounce Rate
- Backlinks
There are many ways to access these analytics. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are great tools for monitoring organic traffic, bounce rate, user acquisition, and top user queries. SEMRush is another popular program for all-around SEO data, including keyword rankings and research, competitor research, backlinks, and much more.
PPC Analytics
PPC, or pay-per-click, is a great way to jumpstart new services or get your brand out in front of as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Essentially, you pay Google (or whichever platform you are using) to place your website at the top of the page.
This can be a powerful tool, but you must keep track of how much money is being spent and what results are being generated.
Conversions can be set up through the advertising platform to track this, and additional tracking can be measured in Google Analytics. Other helpful metrics include:
- CPC (Cost Per Click)
- CTR (Click Through Rate)
- Clicks
- Impressions
As with other marketing endeavors, it’s important to measure performance and spend money only when it’s producing results. As campaigns go on, you’ll accumulate more data, which helps inform future advertising decisions.
Email Analytics
Email marketing has consistently proven to be a worthwhile marketing strategy for businesses, especially for e-commerce and retail. It is a great way to inform an already interested customer base about new products/services, deals and promotions, or general news.
Like with all of the marketing strategies we have discussed previously, to keep improving and growing your marketing efforts, recording and reviewing your analytics is a must.
For email marketing, there are a few important KPI’s to keep your eye on. These include:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Bounce Rate
- Conversions
A great tool for monitoring and managing your email marketing campaigns is MailChimp. This program makes drafting, sending, and reviewing emails a bit easier.
It will outline all of the previously listed analytics for each email sent in a comprehensible way. Make sure to allow for an appropriate amount of time to pass after sending an email to analyze the results (we recommend about one week).
Reviewing the analytics of your previous emails can provide key insights into what your customer base is reactive to, and what they don’t particularly want to see. If you want to learn more about increasing your click-through rate for email campaigns, check out this blog post.
Call Vortex Digital at 319.621.0191 to learn more about digital marketing analytics, data analysis, and customer data. Let us help you elevate your marketing presence today!
