Kris Irizawa

The 5 Impactful Marketing Analytics Process

October 12, 2021

Marketing is a powerful force for any company. Understanding the power of marketing analytics and how to use them correctly can give you an edge in your business.

Gartner’s 2020 Marketing Data and Analytics Survey shows that many marketing executives don’t think the data is helpful. Fifty-four percent of senior marketing respondents in this survey indicate that marketing analytics has not influenced their organizations that they expected. This comes when marketing executives prioritize marketing analytics as a key enabler in supporting their strategies.

Source: Marketing Data and Analytics Survey

This blog post will cover the five impactful marketing analytics processes that every marketer should know and maximize opportunities.

Align with your marketing objective

A company’s investment in online marketing should have tangible results, such as increased revenue or new sales.

Online marketing is an excellent way to drive business results. You can increase revenue, market share, and sales by implementing the right strategies in your company’s website design and through social media campaigns that target potential clients on sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

For these investments to produce tangible benefits, they must be strategically implemented at every level of operation, from top management down, so each department knows what steps need to be taken next!

A good place to start when developing an analytics strategy would include defining macro-level objectives (i e., “macro” goals) paired with micro result rate indicators – aka KPIs – specific towards achieving those higher priority targets. Thus, at the core, identifies objectives and KPIs during the strategic planning phase.

To start this process, you need to think about what you want to find out. So, first, think about the questions that you are trying to answer. Then, keep going past the easy stuff and try to think a little deeper.

Map out measures and data sources

Once you have clear objectives and goals, you need to map out the data that will help you measure your progress. This process can get complicated, especially if your existing systems are not set up for marketing analytics.

Based on your objective, figure out what data you need to answer your initial questions. You will need to find tangible information. Where is your data stored? Who gets access? What tool am I using for my analysis? There are a lot more questions you may have to explore to understand your marketing data sources.

The important thing is to figure out what kind of data you are collecting and if it’s useful to answer some of your business questions.

If you are using data that is not useful, such as having too much data or bad data, it’s time to go back and look at what you need for marketing analytics. Start with the type of data, formats, and sources.

Most marketers already have data in their marketing technology tools like Google Analytics, email service provider, CRM, ad platforms, etc.

Gather data

If you have not yet given data gathering much thought, it is critical to do so.

How are you going to get the data that will help you answer your questions? For marketing analytics, you need to consider how you will extract the data from your current systems and store it.

Once this is done, you can pull together the information that will help answer many of your questions and monitor your success over time.

Many ETL tools in the marketer could help you bring your marketing data into a data lake. Take a look at each of the different parts of your marketing analytics process and see where there are opportunities for you to gather the right data. The data model and the schema will determine how you will be able to answer your questions.

After all necessary data has been gathered, it’s time to look at how well you are doing against key business goals.

Analyze and create reports

Using the tools you have identified from your best marketing data sources, go through and generate reports that will help you understand how well you are doing against your marketing objectives.

Start by looking at top-level KPIs relevant to your marketing objective. Then, identify which key performance indicators are doing well or not.

Then drill down into each of these KPIs and look at the data differently to determine if positive or negative trends are emerging. You can start looking for patterns, outliers, correlations between various factors.

Many marketers will use tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Data Studio to review the KPIs in a dashboard. However, deep-diving into the data and gathering insights requires much knowledge and expertise to analyze the performance.

In many cases, advanced marketing analysts are required to run SQL to get the right data marketers to need to analyze. However, the job description for many marketers does not require SQL or data visualization experience. There aren’t many marketers with data skills, so marketers with data skills are in high demand.

Take action and repeat

Once you have the insights from your marketing analytics, it’s time to test out some of these ideas and see what works for your business.

Try different campaigns with different messages, targets, channels, etc. Then, you can start conducting tests on smaller audiences or select groups of users so that it will be easier to measure their behavior without changes.

A lot of the successful companies I’ve worked with are always testing and trying new things. One of the key behaviors shared amongst such marketing leaders is data-driven and always testing their hypothesis.

On the contrary, marketers who struggle to help move the business forward are always working on setting priorities and cannot execute the marketing strategies. A marketing team that is struggling to perform is always trying to address urgent and important matters. Most marketers want to focus on quadrant 2, or the not so critical but important thing.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is a complicated beast, and marketing analytics are just one of the many aspects that can help you reach your goals.

To get started, we recommend following these steps to align with your marketing objective. Then map out measures and data sources, gather data through various channels like web traffic or social media interactions, analyze and create reports for insights on what’s working and what isn’t to make informed decisions about moving forward with your campaign.

The last step involves taking action based on the information you have gathered from all five points above by repeating the process when necessary. Now go forth (and apply this advice) into your work!

3 Common Traps Marketers Fall into with Data

September 6, 2021

I’ve had the opportunity of working with many marketers from various industries and enterprises. I can tell you that all marketers are aware that data is an integral part of data-driven marketing in the current day in age. However, I’ve learned that many marketers fall into at least one of three traps when it comes to data.

Expecting analytics tool to be a magic fix
Distrust in data – not tracking good data
Not working with data outside of marketing

This article discusses how these three common mistakes can hurt your business and potentially your marketing career.

Expecting analytics tool to be a magic fix

Marketers are often guilty of starting the wrong approach. They usually begin with the tools of the trade rather than determining what they want to accomplish and then finding ways to measure these outcomes. This approach is a grave mistake that can lead you down a path that is less than effective.

Marketers have many options for tracking data, but the trick is being smart about which data you track and how. Begin by asking yourself what your goals are as a marketer. These goals should be measurable and specific to your business goals as well as marketing goals. Once you have those nailed down, it will be easier to figure out.

Many marketers struggle to identify and integrate the right mix of technologies for their marketing teams. One common mistake is over-reliance on new tools, which may not solve the core problems at all.

Marketing technologies are interdependent. No single platform does it all, and the success of a technology you use to measure ROI hinges on whether or not they can make integrations with other marketing systems to be fully effective.

Example marketing technologies include BI solutions, attribution software, marketing automation tools that enhance your brand’s digital presence across multiple channels based upon customer behavior patterns. Any one of these is great when used alone but difficult if there aren’t good integration points between each system.

While it’s natural to want to improve your programs with technology, we’ve seen that it can lead down a slippery slope as you seek out additional tools because they might be “the answer” or just another option in an already full toolbox. So instead, keep working away at progress by staying focused on listening closely and communicating clearly within your team about what works best for them to do their jobs.

Distrust in data – not tracking good data

A new study by Vanson Bourne found that most IT Decision Makers distrust data because the data analytics process is not effective or flawed. 82% of organizations think that data analytics are important, but in 84% of cases, data projects are delayed because the data is in the wrong format. And in 82% of cases, poor quality data makes it difficult to do any work with it.

Because of these data issues, 76% of people said that they missed revenue opportunities. There are also 72% of people who believe this distrust has impacted that customer engagement and satisfaction. In addition, 68% think that the organization is slower than competitors to react to market changes because of this distrust.

Improving data quality for analysis can be done by making it easier to access, cleaning and standardizing the data, modernizing infrastructure that stores the information, and integrating all of these siloes.

According to the study, when asked “what was needed to improve data quality for analysis,” respondents noted some key areas that need better data cleaning and standardization. However, they also added on even more important things such as modernization of infrastructures or integration with other sources, which are called out in particular because over half (53%) call them outgrowing problems behind their lack of trust.

The distrust in data will continue to grow as changes in iOS, and third-party cookie blockers continue to impact data and measurement. As a result, marketers will need to find best practices and use the tools to work with these emerging technical challenges.

Marketers will need to know what works best for your company to obtain your desired results. Therefore, it may be a great idea for you to learn how marketing data collection technologies work.

Not working with data outside of marketing.

In some businesses, they only measure the ROI of a marketing campaign. But this can be a mistake. You can focus on one side of the equation and forget to deal with the other part. They may not know how much their investments are costing them or if their marketing is working well. If you do not know your investments, there is no way to tell if your campaign is going well.

Marketers need to have a good relationship with Finance. Marketing needs to work closely with people who are in charge of the money. Relationship with Finance is important because they need to ensure that their data is accurate, has all the information it needs and is structured to use it. If you want to measure ROI, do this early on and make sure Finance agrees with your plan every step of the way.

Sales also have many data that are in the best interest of marketers. Often, marketers are trying to drive leads or engage prospects, and it ends there. But sales can tell you more.

For example, most sales organizations are working with warm leads and have experiences sharing what opportunities or client profiles are great. You can then use this feedback to do better marketing, and it will help you build great campaigns overall.

Data siloes are very common as companies grow. So it is not surprising that marketing and other teams do not see things eye to eye. Great marketing integration with other departments prevents bad decisions that can cause lost revenue or opportunities. Marketers need to build good relationships with Finance or sales to know what works and the reasoning behind certain numbers, which will help them get actionable insights.

In Summary

Marketing with data is a process that requires patience and dedication. Too often, marketers fall into the trap of expecting analytics tools to be a magic fix for their marketing woes or not trusting in their own company’s data because it feels like they don’t have enough time to track everything.

But suppose you work hard with your team to identify what good data looks like, analyze this information together, and partner up outside of marketing teams with other departments. In that case, you can start seeing success.

The truth is, data can be a valuable tool for your business. But it requires much work to get the results you want, and this starts by knowing what kind of information you need and what tools will work best for you.

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Top 5 Skills That Help You Get a Marketing Analytics Jobs

August 29, 2021

What skills are needed to work in marketing analytics? They might be a little different than what you think. Marketing professionals need analytical skills, such as data visualization and statistical analysis, but they also need more creative skills like storytelling, copywriting, and content strategy. In this post, we’ll tell you which key skills will help you get an analytics job!

Hands-on data tracking deployment

When I first got interested in web analytics, it was about 2005 when blogs were becoming popular, and Google Analytics became available for the public. Getting the tracking up and running is one thing, but getting actionable data from Google Analytics takes much work.

You need to make sure you have the right tracking on all your pages (and that this is done correctly), and then you also need to think about how you use that data in a practical sense.

When I started with web analytics, I couldn’t find many resources about using Google Analytics data. So my best advice is: get your hands dirty and start tracking!

My first few years of experience working in the agency world built my marketing foundation. First, I was reading and studying as much as possible about tracking and data integration. Then, most importantly, applying that knowledge in real-world business.

The hands-on deployment was probably the most important part of the job to build the experience and track record working with large enterprises’ websites. Eventually, those skills helped me get a better job on the client-side.

As you can imagine, the analytics world has changed a lot in the last decade. It’s no longer just about tracking visitor behavior and web traffic.

Enterprise-grade and fast growth business exposure

Most organizations need more than one person looking at the marketing analytics data, which means it’s important to work with others in a team environment.

As a marketer, you need to understand how the business works and what decisions are made at different levels of an organization. You can’t work in marketing analytics by yourself, so communicating with other teams is important!

Following the exposure to enterprise-grade web analytics tools, was getting the experience working with a large e-commerce site. Having that exposure to a business that grew tremendously was an important part of building the foundation for data-driven marketing. In addition, that experience to tie data back to business growth and to deploy marketing strategies with large marketing spend was valuable.

In addition to the above skills specifically related to marketing analytics (data visualization/statistical analysis), you also need broader business-related skills, such as project management, teamwork, interpersonal communication, and budgeting.

For example, you need to prioritize your team’s projects and meet deadlines for various stakeholders. It would help if you also understood how budgets work to know whether or not a proposed initiative is feasible within constraints like time and money.

Business Intelligence Experience

Having the ability to tell stories with data is essential for marketers who want to work in marketing analytics. We are all familiar with seeing pretty graphs or fancy infographics, but you must tell compelling stories about what your audience wants.

One phase in my analytics career that built a firm foundation is adopting BI tools like Tableau, which many companies and marketers use today to find insights from their data.

Learning Tableau and applying it in practice was a game-changer. It allowed me to be free from excel and, most importantly, do more with analytics and insights discovery.

Any analyst needs to be able to communicate your data and insights. Marketing analytics professionals have several ways of expressing their findings, including both verbal and visual presentations. You should know how to use visuals and statistics effectively to tell a compelling story that persuades the audience at hand.

In Business Intelligence, knowing how the data is collected, presented, and reported is important. Creating a data dictionary of metrics that you use regularly can help ensure everyone in your organization understands what certain terms mean. In addition, having the data dictionary or data definitions can be helpful when working with other departments or people outside of marketing.

Knowing about how ETL processes work is also important for marketers in current days in age. Once you have a certain metric, it’s often useful to break it into different segments (e.g., by product category or geographic area). You can’t do this if you don’t know how the data gets extracted, ingested, and transformed from its initial form into something more manageable and relevant for your analysis.

Data wrangling skills

First, you need to be able to understand the data. Marketing analytics is one of those professions that require knowledge in both Big Data and traditional marketing skills. You should know how to access your data, clean it up (i.e., remove duplicates), analyze it for insights, and report on what you’ve found with a clear explanation.

Data wrangling means being able to extract the data you need from your various sources, as well as being able to clean and organize it. You can use Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau, or other tools for this process.

Data wrangling is one of the most important skills for working with data. Unfortunately, it’s also one of those tasks that might be considered more tedious and frustrating than it sounds, so you need to make sure that you enjoy this part before committing to your career!

Suppose you’re a marketer and not able to work with SQL or just tired of data wrangling in Excel. In that case, there are tools like Tableau Prep or Google Trifecta that allow anyone to transform data into usable data to analyze.

Any analytics professional will tell you; data preparation is a big part of their day-to-day operation. I’ve read some articles that could take up 70% of analysts’ time for data prep related tasks. It shows how much data wrangling is an important skill set to have.

Client facing experience

Lastly, you need to know how to tell a story. Although data is important in marketing analytics professions, there are times when it doesn’t give us all of the answers we need or want. This is where storytelling can help fill in those gaps – providing context for how we got to where we are now and what might happen next.

Marketing professionals need communication skills, both verbal and visual/aesthetic. You should be able to tell a story with your data or visuals as well as with words. Client-facing experience is important because you’ll be presenting your findings to people regularly.

Marketing analyst’s clients aren’t necessarily limited to external clients. Internal stakeholders within the company could also be your client. So, it’s important to communicate your findings in a way that is easy to understand, knowing that anyone you face or present with data is your client.

In Summary

If you are looking to get a job in marketing analytics, I covered these five skills that will help you be successful.

Hands-on data tracking deployment
Enterprise-grade and fast growth business exposure
Business Intelligence Experience
Data wrangling skills
Client facing experience

In the end, what matters most when applying for jobs is that you have the right combination of experience and relevant skillset. We hope this article helps narrow down some possibilities so that you can use them with confidence! Happy hunting!

What is Digital Analytics for Marketing

August 27, 2021

What is digital analytics for marketing

The digital world has come a long way in the last decade. However, today’s businesses have to be digitally savvy if they want any chance of success. For many companies, this can seem like an uphill battle. With so much going on, it can be hard to keep your head above water. That’s where digital analytics comes in!

Digital analytics is all about analyzing data from various sources – everything from social media posts to website clicks – to learn more about your customers and how you can better serve them through your marketing efforts. This post will explore just what digital analytics is and why it is so important for your marketing efforts.

Digital analytics provide you with information on how people are engaging with your content and visiting your website, their interests, where they come from, and much more. Although no two businesses will use the same data practice to learn about their customers, there are a few important things that you should know.

Digital Analytics focuses on connecting points between customer and business properties. It includes traffic metrics, campaign performance to assess a company’s marketing effectiveness.

Business analytics helps companies improve their decision-making processes by focusing on operational metrics (processes) and stakeholder interactions while optimizing business functionality using web & mobile user behavior data.

Why is Digital Analytics Important?

Digital analytics is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. However, it shouldn’t even be considered separate from your overall marketing strategy. You are missing out on a huge opportunity to put data to work for your business if you do!

Digital Analytics is important to help businesses solve some of their problems. For example, they allow companies to improve efficiency and optimize customer experiences by providing accurate website/mobile app performance and user behavior analysis.

Let’s look at some of the specifics.

Digital Analytics helps with decision-making.

By using Digital Analytics to track key metrics, you can get an accurate picture of the effectiveness of your efforts and campaigns.

Digital Analytics is important for making website improvements. Whether digging deep into user behavior or taking a more basic approach by tracking website traffic flows, site metrics are essential in understanding what’s working and what’s not on your website.

Digital Analytics is essential for cost-cutting efforts. It helps you identify areas you need to cut costs, whether by eliminating low-performing marketing campaigns or optimizing your website and online resources, which is the first step in improving your bottom line.

Digital Analytics helps answer what customers want.

It can be a challenge to determine how your customers are interacting with your brand with all the available data. Conducting market research and tracking metrics can help you get ahead of the competition by knowing what your customers need before they do.

By creating a tailored experience for your customers, you can not only drive sales but stay ahead of the competition as well. Marketers are well aware of the importance of optimizing customer experiences to gain market share in today’s competitive online environment. In fact, according to a recent study by Forrester Research, “marketing leaders say that they need more insight into customers and channel partners to optimize experience.”

Growing and optimizing your business by supporting data-driven marketing.

Today, marketing is all about reaching potential customers at the right time and in the right place. Digital analytics enables marketers to engage with prospects on their terms throughout the customer lifecycle — from initial contact through brand awareness, interest, purchase, advocacy, and beyond.

The data you collect could be integrated with another marketing platform for more in-depth analysis and help marketing tools execute and optimize better. A good example of this is integrating user behavior data through a web analytics tool with customer profile data in CRM. Knowing who is doing what and how engaged with your brand is key to digital analytics and data-driven marketing.

For many years, personalization has been talked about by creating relevant, timely customer experiences that match both user behavior and business goals. Marketers want to understand their customers and deliver personalized and rich experiences in an omnichannel world.

Personalization would be supported by data and the capabilities within the digital analytics domain.

Common Digital Analytics related services

Web analytics

Tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics are used to carry out digital analytics, which comes under web analytics. Web analytics provides data on how many visitors visited your website, the pages they liked or visited, where they come from, and more information.

Tag Management service

A tag management service is used to monitor the usage of all types of tags on your website. Tags are snippets of code used by marketers for various purposes like remarking, measuring conversions, and more. Google Tag Manager or Tealium is a tool that helps you implement these tags effectively on your website.

The skill sets required for tag management are different from analytics skills. Managing tags is a challenge for marketers, from effectively defining tags to deploying across the web properties.

With the help of tag management tools, marketers can easily manage and deploy tags efficiently. However, an advanced deployment of the tags will require skills to understand HTML, javascript, API, etc.

Business Intelligence

BI is important for marketers to make informed decisions on various elements like different digital campaigns and traffic sources. An analyst can share the marketing performance data collected by digital analytics with the marketing team through a business intelligence tool in visualizations or dashboards.

In addition, the information can be presented in the form of tables, charts, graphs, etc. These tools will help marketers to monitor and optimize their digital campaigns regularly.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)

Using marketing data and analytics, marketers could practice CRO to improve conversion rates for their digital campaigns. CRO requires integrating various skills; marketers might need data analysis skills to identify the buying process’s pain points and optimize those areas.

It requires knowledge about different tools like Google Analytics, heat map tracking, usability testing, etc. The conversion rate optimization is time-consuming compared to other processes, but it brings better results for the company.

Commonly known as A/B testing, a CRO practice requires individual assumptions to be tested against each other for determining which variation performs better than the other. As a result, CRO helps marketers learn more about what makes people buy their products and what doesn’t. In addition, data from A/B testing allows marketers to drive their digital initiatives towards better results.

PPC Optimization for Paid Search, Social, and Display

Performing digital analytics for paid search, social, and display networks helps understand the high cost-per-click and what drives more traffic to the website. Using this data, marketers could tweak their budgets to spend more on areas, driving traffic and leads.

Running multiple campaigns at once might lead to a proper comparison of PPC. Campaign optimizations help marketers to optimize their budget and spend more on areas where it is required. Digital marketers approach vendors who offer technology, tools, and expertise to optimize their ads and have the best-performing campaigns.

One of the most important digital analytics tools for PPC campaign optimization is Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives marketers an idea about the source of traffic, mediums, keywords, and more that help them continuously implement a strategy to improve results.

Who owns the Digital Analytics discipline and resources?

Identifying the Digital Analytics discipline owner is an important question because depending on the answer, you could end up with a wide spectrum of needs and capabilities.

There may be a centralized Digital Analytics team in some organizations that owns the discipline for all marketing efforts, including website, mobile app, social media, paid search, email, and more. On the other hand, some companies may find fragmented strategies across different departments with limited resources.

The Digital Analytics team should own the discipline, covering all digital touchpoints across all marketing efforts. While Marketing may contribute expertise on customer insights and SEO best practices, they don’t necessarily need ownership over operational execution and system management.

Every organization has different reasons why such a digital analytics role would be funded and reside under which department. The common case where digital analytics would be within an organization would be:

Marketing department under CMO budget
Under BI team under IT or CTO office
Decentralized analytics roles across departments

What should a business expect from Digital Analytics capabilities or services?

Digital Analytics is a key part of the digital marketing strategy for any company. To give your business an edge over competitors, you’ll want to make sure that you have the right data and insights available at all times.

Analytics help marketers understand how customers behave online and knowing what they find valuable about your product or service offerings, which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website, and much more.

How Digital Analytics Built My Marketing Career

August 24, 2021

I started my career in a financial securities company working in data processing automation for securities trading for institutional clients. Around 2005 when the blog was taking off, Google Analytics was launched. It was a game-changing event for me.

I had been thinking about what I wanted to do next with my career. One of the things that came up was wanting to get into marketing and analytics. I believe at that time, with server costs expected to decline, more data will become available for anyone. I truly thought that digital businesses would eventually take off, and data will become one of the most important parts of running such businesses.

Digital Analytics seemed like a perfect fit for me, given my expertise in data processing automation, data query language SQL, and writing scripts. It just so happened Google launched their new web analytics tool, “Google Analytics,” in 2005 and made it available for free to anyone that owned a website.

What is Digital Analytics

Digital Analytics is the process of measuring, collecting, and analyzing data about user behavior to improve engagement. There are many different types of analytics, but all share a common goal: understanding what’s happening on your site or app to make informed decisions that will positively impact user experience. Digital Marketing Analytics is an emerging discipline in marketing with its own set of tools and techniques.

In 2005, the common terminology that described tracking and measuring the website was referred to as web analytics. However, it was also considered a subset of the larger discipline, referred to as Digital Analytics.

Web analytics consists of many different types of tracking and analysis around:

Content engagement tracking: Understand what content visitors are viewed
Traffic source and campaign tracking: Where visitors came from to access your website and landing pages.
Conversion tracking: Understand where the visitor came from and purchased a specific product at a certain price.

Digital Analytics has evolved since the early 2000s. Today, it is the primary discipline of marketing and management that focuses on understanding user behavior online to improve engagement with your company or product.

Digital analytics has helped businesses of all sizes grow. For example, by using technology to collect data from our online marketing activity, we can better understand what resonates with customers and how they engage with content through the different devices they use throughout their day.

The goal here is to grow customer experience and convert more consumers into paying customers by understanding which digital channels work best for them and when (morning vs. night) or where (mobile vs. desktop).

How I got started with analytics for marketing

I started my marketing career in 2006 as a marketing analyst at a digital agency, where I got the chance to learn about analytics and the optimization process on websites for clients in the CPG industry.

At that time, there weren’t many job openings for marketing analytics. Instead, it was geared towards IT or some technical role that supports marketers enabling tracking and building reports.

Many enterprise companies are now investing heavily in the digital marketing space, but only a few large companies have invested in enterprise-grade web analytics platforms. Having Google Analytics experience on the resume didn’t help much, as many marketing managers were looking for specific experience with certain tools on a resume.

What helped me get a marketing job was making a strong case around my data engineering skill-set and tying it back to my projects building blogs. Getting my foot into the door on the agency side was a great choice when I had zero experience in marketing.

The foundation of skills that help me get analytics jobs

My marketing foundation was built in the first few years of my career in the agency world, when I was reading and studying as much as possible about tracking and data integration.

It’s been an amazing ride since then!

As you can imagine, the analytics world has changed a lot in the last decade. It’s no longer just about tracking visitor behavior and web traffic, but also audience growth, social media marketing with advertising for performance-driven campaigns on Facebook, and many other SNS and ad channels.

Another phase in my analytics career that built a firm foundation is adopting Tableau, a BI tool that many companies and marketers use today to find insights from their data. Learning Tableau and applying it in practice was a game-changer. It allowed me to be free from excel and, most importantly, do more with analytics and insights discovery.

Three important lessons I learned to become a data-driven marketer

1) Set the right expectations by interpreting the data according to the stakeholder

This means asking, “What is this data telling me?” and what would the key stakeholders who would see the data or reporting would take away from the insight?

As a marketer working with data, you will find many bad results or marketing outcomes that aren’t living up to the goal. It’s up to you how you tell the story, but it is important to set the right expectations for stakeholders, so your data don’t mislead them.

2) Avoid vanity metrics

There are many KPIs that marketers obsess over but don’t correlate with customer acquisition or retention. A great example of this is social media likes and followers. As a marketer who will need to bring results to the business, it is important to focus on metrics that bring value.

Use data trends and analysis to determine how that impacts the KPI and the business’s bottom line. And know what the objective of the data asks is since it is very common for management to ask marketers with different intent, depending on the business they’re in.

On one day, asking for conversion rate means a CEO is trying to prepare a comment for a board meeting, and on another day, the question’s intent could be to learn what the team should be working on to improve the sales. But if you as a marketer understand the difference between vanity metrics and KPIs, you can prepare yourself to answer questions quickly and efficiently.

3) Understand how the data is tracked and avoid bad data

I’m sure you’ve heard “Garbage In Garbage Out,” which is the idea that bad data will result in a distorted analysis. With analytics, it’s true!

You have to be very careful when choosing what data you want to collect. It is also important to know how the information you’re tracking and reporting is being collected and processed within the data tool from which you pull the data.

I’ve come across many situations where marketers refer to the term conversion rates, but the numbers and math used to define the conversion rate make it a very different metric.

It would be best to be extremely careful, especially when you encounter a situation where the collection and methodology change for data representing the business’s KPI. Executives never enjoy the case when their KPI’s definition varies because the last thing they want is an unpredictable measure of their success or progress.

What you can learn from my path to become a data-driven marketer

I learned that data is a powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal, but it also requires experts who understand how and when to use it for different purposes. It’s easy to be seduced by vanity metrics or without understanding what stakeholders ask about KPIs. However, you can become a valuable asset in any company when you know how to interpret the data and what tools are better for certain KPIs.

A successfully seasoned marketer who is data-savvy could reap the benefit of a higher salary, promotions, etc.

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