PART 1 - Review Analytics + Compare ROI

 

Where to spend your digital marketing resources, based on the analytics in your Captavi Platform.

Data Science has grown alongside the growth in digital marketing technology, which has led business transformation.  As a marketing data scientist, I know just how pervasive this change has become, because we use marketing technologies at work to drive business and engage with marketing technologies both inside and outside of work for our daily activities: shopping, reading, sharing, eating, entertaining and being entertained — everything we do (well almost everything).

And what does all this collection of data create?  Well, besides more business, it creates lots and lots of insight on what has worked and what has not worked. Bottom line - your ROI. While data science has been omnipresent with marketing like, forever, in some form or another, it has grown in demand as an IT discipline because there is so much data being created every nanosecond of the day.

One of the beauties of the Captavi Platform is the ease-of-use across the entire system, including reviewing and digesting the analytics to determine your next steps.  You don’t have to be a data science savant to find and understand the data that’s underneath your marketing efforts.   

Let’s look at a few features of the Captavi Platform Analytics dashboard tabs to help you get started on developing a sound results-centric digital marketing budget for 2018. 

Where to spend my online marketing dollars? 

The first place to take a look is the Captavi Platform Analytics OVERVIEW analytics tab.

See "Our traffic balance” chart on the Figure 1: "Overview – 30 days” and "Overview – 365 days” analytics tabs.  You’ll see percentages (and counts when you mouse-over any pie section) for the sources of your web traffic.   Search engines and sponsored websites appear here, as well as a catch-all "direct” category.  It’s easy to see how well your online marketing is working – and what you need to change. A great rule-of-thumb here is a quick ROI calculation. How much time and money have you invested and the return you have received?

For instance:

IF you spent $2,000/month on your Pay-Per-Click (Paid) traffic, which is 30% of your overall digital marketing investment and you are experiencing anything less 30% of your OVERALL traffic for 2017 THEN the outcome of this review is ADJUST OR DECLINE YOUR INVESTMENT IN PAID TRAFFIC. This is a super logic step if the ROI of your investment is not providing a good return. Wasn't that easy? No pouring over screens and screens of stats. By the way, the analytics are straight out of the native integration with Google Analytics. 

And, on the flip side, if you are see more than 30% of your Paid Traffic resulting from your investment than you can make a confident decision to increase your (Paid) traffic investment in 2018.

How are my online marketing channels performing as compared with each other?

On the "Email marketing” analytics tab, at the top you’ll find another great pie chart, "How does email compare against other channels”) that shows percentages (again, mouse-over to see counts) for key online marketing channels, including email, social, organic search, direct, and referral. This is a great way to review your digital marketing mix and indicate whether you need to bump up or complement marketing campaigns utilizing your different channels.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this four-part Captavi Data Science: 2018 Digital Marketing Budget Planning blog series, which will show you how to augment the information that Captavi Platform already provides with additional marketing-oriented data.

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About Guest Blogger - Jeff Westenhaver

Jeff is a solutions-driven data scientist with 20+ years of progressive sales and marketing experience, plus broad customer experience in IT.  He received his Master of Science in Analytics from Texas A&M University and earned the Roland H. Acra Master of Science in Analytics Award in recognition of producing the most outstanding Masters project in Analytics. He serves on the Captavi Advisory Council.

Follow him on Twitter @JeffW_Analytics