How Custom Omnichannel Marketing Analytics Can Make or Break a Campaign

Anticipating and understanding consumer behavior and engagement with your brand is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks for marketers and advertisers. Desktop, mobile, social, audio, TV and other channels are coming at us at an accelerated pace. With them have come fundamental questions. On which channel(s) will consumers discover your brand and products? Which channel mix is best for your brand to reach consumers? Where will consumers ultimately make a purchase? How can you outsmart the competition? The answers to these questions are important – and omnichannel marketing analytics can help. We’ve looked over the horizon to provide a more vivid picture of how marketing analytics can set your digital advertising campaigns up for success. Let’s dive in.

But first, let’s define omnichannel marketing analytics.

Omnichannel marketing is an approach to marketing that addresses the customer experience on each channel – desktop browser, mobile, retail, social media, podcast, and any others you might use – and how customers transition between each channel as they make purchases.

Omnichannel marketing analytics consolidates and organizes marketing data into a single view, so you can more easily understand marketing performance, improve your time-to-insight, and apply insights to improve marketing return-on-investment (ROI).

Analytics identifies the best target audience for your campaign.

Your target audience is a segment of consumers made up of past, current, and prospective customers who are most likely to be interested in purchasing your product or service. It’s virtually impossible to identify this audience without marketing analytics – whether you own it in-house or work with an outside analytics partner.

Identifying your target audience starts with gathering and combining data from a variety of sources, including historical campaign performance data, website data, and CRM data. This can be done manually, but today there are tools like Adverity, Domo, and Tableau that can quickly organize and analyze data to generate insights into who is most likely to be responsive to your advertising campaign. For instance, you may be convinced that millennial moms are your target audience, but the data analysis may say otherwise. If so, you can redefine your target audience before campaign launch or optimize throughout the campaign as more data becomes available.

Knowing who your target audience is will determine your campaign’s targeting strategy and will inform the campaign’s messaging and call-to-action.

Analytics determines the highest-performing channel mix for your campaign.

Analytics can be used to do more than just pinpoint your target audience – it can be used to determine the channel strategy for your digital advertising campaign. Once you understand who your target audience is, you can use analytics to map the most common path to conversion and to understand where your target audience is spending their time online.

Mapping the path to conversion takes into consideration the different channels, devices, and creative formats or touchpoints your audience engages with leading up to conversion. Which channel(s) drove brand awareness? Which channels triggered a conversion? Knowing the touchpoints that are proven to move your audience through the sales funnel helps to inform where and when you make your digital advertising investments and sets your campaign up for success from the get-go.

Analytics can help you increase return-on-ad-spend (ROAS)

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” – John Wanamaker

Whether or not John Wanamaker’s quote rings true for you, one thing most advertisers can agree on is that they all want to make the most of each dollar they invest in advertising. To start, you can lean on analytics to establish your ROAS benchmarks by channel using historical campaign data, or, if you don’t have enough historical data, you can look to industry data to establish benchmarks. ROAS is critical for evaluating the performance of your advertising campaign and how it impacts your overall marketing goals.

Once you have established benchmarks by channel, you can refine your campaign strategy to reflect which channels you can safely back scale on and which channels deserve additional investments. To further refine your campaign strategy and drive maximum ROAS, you can pair analytics with attribution data. Doing this will ensure you don’t scale too far back on critical channel touch points that may occur after the initial touchpoint and before conversion.

Getting started with analytics to drive campaign performance

Omnichannel marketing analytics can make or break the performance of your advertising campaign, and the ability to conduct campaign and audience analysis quickly is critical to having smart strategy upfront and before a penny is ever spent on media.

Analytics not only shows you which audiences are most likely to become loyal customers but how your campaign is driving conversions and which channels along the path to conversion are worth investing in and which channels you cut back on.

Through conversations with our own clients, brands and agencies, we know that every advertisers’ analytics needs are different. Still, we have found that there are some quick wins to be had for advertisers who are willing to put data first when developing campaign strategies.

To learn how Digilant is putting data and analytics in the hands of advertisers, contact us today for a demo of our custom analytics dashboard solutions, or learn more here.