Marketing analytics for the modern marketer: actionable insights for accelerated growth

Marketing analytics is one of the least understood tools of modern business — especially by non-marketers. They understand the terms “marketing” and “analytics,” but misunderstand the significance of the actual tools and practices.

The problem?

Generally, non-marketers think of marketing analytics as a record of the past. It’s true: marketing analytics is about marketing. And yes, it does incorporate analytics about past campaigns. But it is very far from a dry, dusty, history book that tells you stories about what has already happened.

Used correctly, modern marketing teams rely on analytics to tell stories about the future. And those stories? They unlock massive growth marketing opportunities.

Absolutely, marketing analytics is about marketing metrics. And no, we don’t have future metrics time machines yet.

That’s OK.

The metrics or data points on what marketing you’ve done, how much it cost, and how well your campaigns performed are of critical importance. That’s why Singular has class-leading ROI reporting, providing full knowledge of your return on investment for all your marketing efforts at a granular level.

That means understanding both the full costs of each marketing activity, whether paid or organic, and the specific results every activity achieved. Granularity is important here: when you have ROI reporting at a granular level, you have data on your results not just by overall campaign, but also by every ad set or grouping.

You’ve even got it by individual creatives — the images, videos, or playable ads you’re using — or by grouped sets of creative around similar themes. For example: all ads with a yellow Volkswagen bug in them.

But the purpose of metrics is insight. And insight is futuristic.

After all, the point of marketing analytics and the metrics they contain is not simply to have them. Or to display them in pretty little charts for the CEO. The point is data-driven insight. That’s what unlocks growth, and that’s precisely what CMOs told us is one of their most critical priorities for 2019.

“What is the biggest data challenge for marketers in 2019? Building actionable results based off of accurate data,” says Felicity Carson, CMO of IBM Watson Customer Engagement. “We continue to see an inability of our clients to properly read analytics and come to assumptions.”

So achieving insights is key to future growth.

The interesting thing: Singular does this in a fairly unique way. Think of it as putting your left hand and your right hand together. (Bear with me!)

In your left hand are all the marketing activities you are doing: campaigns, ads, emails, offers, websites, apps, and more. In your right hand are all the results your activities are generating: sales, sign-ups, app installs, awareness, engagement, sharing, and more.

A marketing analytics platform that works for marketers doesn’t just show you one hand. And it doesn’t just show you uncontextualized results. Rather, a marketing analytics platform like Singular combines the two … showing you both cause and effect.

And, importantly, linking them so you get full context and insight into exactly what drives which results. (We call that a marketing intelligence system. It’s just a little smarter than a marketing data analytics tool.)

Seeing both cause and effect linked tells you not only what’s happening, but provides insight into why. And why is critical.

Unifying and combining “left and right hand” data in a marketing platform is the best possible way to reveal hard ROI and true CAC across all marketing activities. That’s exactly what unleashes marketers to find pockets of profitable growth: understanding which activities will unlock the highest potential ROI.

In other words: finding the why.

Those actionable insights might include benchmarking both against your own past performance and current broader market conditions, trend analysis, or forecasting for key performance indicators like ROI, LTV, budgets, and CAC. And they come from simulations and testing, predictive modeling, and a marketing platform that delivers recommendations based on both first-party data as well as third-party data.

The other core reason Singular refers to our growth marketing platform as a marketing intelligence suite is simple. You can’t drive meaningful insight over the long term by only looking at small pieces of the puzzle.

You have to unify your marketing data. And you might have too many marketing analytics tools.

“The problem is, we’ve put too many tools in place to collect and analyze marketing data that are too hard to use and it’s causing a lot of frustration,” says Tim Minahan, CMO of Citrix. “Marketing professionals are spending way too much time searching for information and clicking through multiple pages in applications to gather the insights they need to design, execute, and measure effective campaigns.”

That means your marketing analytics tools have to be able to ingest, process, attribute, and report on data from all your marketing campaigns, channels, initiatives, and efforts. Data in dozens or hundreds of different siloes is not usable. So automated ingestion of data into a single location for digital marketing analytics is essential.

That starts with sources: email, web, mobile, app stores, and e-commerce systems, just to name a few.

But it also includes paid advertising channels such as ad networks: collecting setup details automatically such as targeting criteria, creative data, bids, budgets, and more. Delivery data such as impressions, clicks/taps, and cost is critical, of course, as is conversion data: app installs, purchases, custom events, revenue, and more.

Most analytics tools don’t offer that. But it’s absolutely necessary.

“With a holistic view of data, powered by marketing intelligence, campaign performance will drastically improve, and otherwise unidentified business opportunities will become unlocked,” say Rebecca Mahoney, CMO at MiQ.

My favorite quote on the changing role of marketing and marketers is from one of the top marketers on the planet. Currently at Doordash, he was the former head of marketing science at Lyft. He’s also worked for AirBnB, was a researcher at Stanford, and served as a quant trader at Deutsche Bank.

“As a scientist, the only thing I believe in is experimentation. I look at my current system, perturb it through different creative and different levels of spend, and different bids, and new channels, and new partners, and I look what the effect is on the metric I care about.”

Alok Gupta, Head of Data Science & Machine Learning, Doordash

Today is the age of the marketing scientist. Marketing scientists use tools. They use data. But they are not defined by their tools or their data. Instead, they are defined by their mindset. Marketing scientists operate as scientists:

• They form hypotheses
• They run experiments
• They measure results
• They optimize based on their source of truth: accurate ROI for every marketing activity

And marketing analytics — properly conceived as a unified single source of truth — is an essential partner in that task.

The goal, of course, remains the same: profitable growth.

Singular provides unrivaled ROI insights at the highest levels of accuracy and the deepest levels of granularity (no fewer than 8 levels deep!) We also help you visual creative-level insights so you know which creative is performing best at any given time — even across multiple campaigns and different ad networks.

Plus, we tailor the precise consolidated analytics you need to your specific company and campaigns. That means custom dimensions, custom metrics, and custom events: all tailored to fit.

And, complete your marketing data analysis with best-in-class fraud prevention from Singular. It has ground-breaking capabilities like Android Install Validation, not available anywhere else. Now you have all you need to transform your growth marketing initiatives.

And maybe … get a big bonus this year!

There’s a lot more to dive into. Get all the information you need — and the insight to grow faster — by getting deeper.

Here’s how to move forward:

• Check out all the details of Singular’s solution
• Get a personal demo showing how Singular can work for you
• See how current customers are winning