How to choose the best marketing analytics tool for the web
Discernment is important when choosing a marketing analytics platform.
Choosing the best marketing analytics tools for your organization’s website takes a certain level of discernment. Not every business depends on pageview tracking; product teams rely on valuable data that some tools aren’t designed to track.
“Over the years I’ve seen teams build up troves of unusable data,” said Lex Roman, Growth Designer at website optimization and design company Super Easy Digital, in her recent MarTech presentation. “If you want to be able to act on your data, your team has to be able to easily access and understand it.”
She added, “You want to use a tool that lets you decide what information matters to your team.”
View the full presentation from our MarTech conference here (free registration required).
No marketer wants to add more work to their plate, especially when it comes to tracking customer data. That’s why it’s so important to choose the analytics tool best suited for your business from the get-go.
Choosing a marketing analytics tool
Picking a marketing analytics tool doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are some important things to consider when choosing the best marketing analytics software tools for your business.
Sessions vs. events
Not all marketing analytics tools use the same type of tracking. Website-oriented software, such as Google Analytics, focuses on capturing data from sessions that take place. Conversely, tools designed to observe how users are interacting with products on the website, like Amplitude, primarily track events such as button clicks. It all depends on your business offering.
Roman said, “If you’re working on a digital product, you want a tool that was designed with that use case in mind.” The reverse is also true; organizations that rely on traffic to their content should use session-focused software.
Useful data visualizations
Aside from the ability to capture relevant data, your analytics tool should provide clear visualizations to help your team make sense of it. These should be easy to generate and modify at any stage in your marketing campaigns.
Accessibility
Marketers that can’t share their analytics data with their teams or stakeholders won’t be able to prove their efforts were worthwhile. Look for tools that offer cloud-based dashboard solutions so data can be shared across a variety of platforms.
Customer journey analysis
“As marketers, we know that nothing happens in a silo,” said Amer Toro-Keech of Disruptive Advertising in a separate MarTech session. “Customer journey analytics helps us look at how everything is working together.”
The analytics software you choose should have to ability to capture data from customers at multiple touchpoints. It should follow them through their journey and glean insights from their behavior.
Customer journey orchestration: A snapshot
What it is. Customer journey orchestration software lets marketers connect real-time data points from across channels, touchpoints and systems, allowing users to gain insights into the customer journey over time. This allows marketers to explore the customer journey using data.
Why it’s hot today. Businesses know they need to be customer-focused in each aspect of their marketing operations. As a first step, brands need to understand how consumers are finding them. Whether it be via search, advertisement, or word of mouth, the medium used will set the trajectory for the rest of their journey.
Meanwhile, the average person uses many devices to access the internet, and Cisco forecasts that the number of devices connected to IP networks will increase to more than three times the global population by 2023. With so many devices, people shift back and forth depending on the task at hand and their current environment. Consumers and business buyers turn to an average of nine channels to browse product inventory, look for advice, and make purchases.
Capturing their interactions post-discovery, such as communication with a call center or visit to a retail outlet, helps brands see which of their assets are helping them along their path. What’s more, brands need to know what those who convert do post-purchase–this information helps companies win repeat business and encourage customer advocacy. Customer journey orchestration tools do just that.
What the tools do. The majority of vendors offer one or more of the following capabilities to give marketers an understanding of the customer journey: data gathering from a wide variety of channels and touchpoints; analysis using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and customer journey visualization.
Many vendors also offer customer journey orchestration (CJO) capabilities, which allow users to act upon the insights and actually deliver the next step in the customer journey in real-time.
Why we care. Customers expect to have consistent experiences at each of these touchpoints. They want personalization, a trend that continues to grow. Tools like customer journey analytics software give brands the ability to gain insights from their audience and act on them.
Dig Deeper: What is customer journey orchestration and how are these tools helping marketers?
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
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