What is advertising analytics?
Advertising analytics refers to the marketing process that involves collecting, measuring, and analysing data to measure the performance and effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
Data collected through advertising analytics provides insights into how the campaign has performed. This information enables businesses and marketing professionals who are decision-makers to use data to ultimately optimise their campaign effectiveness. Analytics are tracked using various methods to assess the impact of the advertisements on its audience’s engagement, conversion rates, return on investment (ROI) and how it fits in with the business’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
Advertising analytics are important as they help decision-makers improve their advertising campaigns. Due to the many marketing channels and tactics used to advertise, capturing analytics from these channels is extremely important. It tells marketing professionals what channels and types of advertising are working and what isn’t.
The insights derived from advertising analytics lead to marketing professionals refining their strategies and making decisions that ultimately result in more success as goals and targets are achieved.
Tracking your analytics
When tracking advertising analytics, it involves a combination of tools, technologies, and strategies to gather, analyse and interpret data.
Here are some effective ways to track advertising analytics:
It is essential for the email platform that is being used for campaigns to be paired with an analytical tool that can track how the email campaigns are performing. Tracking data like open rates, click-through rates, engagement, etc. It is important to know how people are engaging or not engaging with your campaigns and what you need to work on/keep doing.
This is a way to analyse what your audience resonates and engages with, and test two or more advertisement creatives, headlines or targeting strategies where you can compare the performances of these advertisements. This enables marketing professionals to identify what resonates best and what creates the most engagement.
Utilise the built-in tools on social media platforms, that track your analytics of paid and unpaid advertisements. Track metrics like engagement, reach and clicks. From these analytics, you can gauge what types of content work for your audiences, and what platforms are creating the best results for your needs.
Find a tool that works for your website and track those web analytics! This can help you to understand more in detail about how your website is being used, what is working and what isn’t and what changes you can make to improve and enhance the overall user experience.
What are the benefits of analytics?
By gathering advertising analytics from past campaigns, you can alter any future campaigns from the learnings of the previous campaigns, be that from positive or negative results, and use data-based decisions to plan and design future campaigns. It is a forever cycle of learning and changing.
With the high value placed on advertising, most companies are required to show that their marketing spend is having positive results. With advertising analytics, you can track the statistics such as conversion rates of someone clicking a paid ad on Instagram or how many visits your website has. Alongside being able to show evidence of marketing spending creating value, advertising analytics can also help plan out yearly marketing budgets. Knowing what marketing channels and which types of advertising work best, results in less risk of loss and increased revenue so your budget can spread further and gain better results.
When collecting advertising analytics, you can collect information on who the audience is. This information helps build a picture of your demographic. Including age, gender, location and interests, this data is helpful as you can now segment your audience and create advertisements that will reach and resonate with those demographic groups.
The Challenges…
The world of advertising can often be a cluttered space, with marketing professionals having a lot on their plates, adding data collection, measurement and analysis creates more work. Due to this clutter, it's likely for errors to occur, and this can cause problems such as missing/incorrect data which compromises the results and then impacts decisions. Having quality data is extremely important, according to Graphite "one of the primary challenges is ensuring the quality and integrity of the data. Inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to misleading insights and inaccurate predictions. To overcome this challenge, it is crucial to invest in data quality management practices, including data cleansing, validation, and integration."
While data analysis is important when making decisions, some people become reliant on using data to drive every decision. This isn’t necessarily the right thing to do, as if you are hyper-focused on data and data only you may begin to ignore your business goals and values as you are focused on the small details instead of the bigger picture of how a decision can affect your business.
Consumer behaviour and the trends they follow are extremely important to shaping how advertisements are created and interpreted. Trends and behaviours are something that can change very quickly, and it is extremely important to keep up with the ever-changing customer trends. According to Clic Data “When it comes to marketing analytics, getting ahead of your customers’ needs and preferences is crucial so that you can create more effective messaging and showcase the ROI of your marketing activities.” This can be a challenge as it is hard to keep up with the changes that seem to be happening every month, let alone try to predict the future trends that may come.