Download Your Free Excerpt from the MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report

by David Kirkpatrick, Senior Reporter

Because of digital marketing platforms — email, website, mobile, social media — marketers are awash in data. Marketing analytics is the means to take control over that fire hose of customers and prospect data and turn it into information for improving individual campaigns and overall marketing strategy.

Some of the latest MarketingSherpa research addresses this important aspect of marketing in the digital world with the 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report.

This research is based on 1,131 surveyed marketers and provides insights into analytics for marketing channels including email, social media, SEO, content and more.

The surveyed marketers provided some interesting insights, and also highlighted areas where marketers could improve in taking advantage of this valuable marketing asset.

The availability of marketing analytics data is promising with 79% reporting having average, significant and even vast amounts of client interaction data to analyze. Only 3% reported having no analytics data at all. An overwhelming majority — 97% — of marketers have some amount of marketing analytics data to work with.

Unfortunately, the tag team challenge of time and resources are the two biggest reported pain points to marketers actually leveraging that data to gain insights into the effectiveness of marketing programs. Less than 50% of surveyed marketers are able to leverage this data, with 21% reporting a lack of resources and 20% citing time as the top two challenges to taking advantage of marketing analytics.

Other findings from this research include:

• Generating reports is a more common analytic activity than gaining insights — 48% of marketers are creating custom reports, but only 27% add custom variables to analytics platforms to glean deeper insights into the data


• Engagement rate metrics are tracked more often than revenue-based metrics — 50% or more surveyed marketers tracking KPIs such as open rate, clickthrough rate, unsubscribe rate and deliverability; only 28% report tracking ROI


• 66% of surveyed marketers report acting on data to improve marketing performance is the most important objective for marketing analytics in 2013


• 53% report expecting to increase marketing analytics investment in 2013

These survey results paint a picture illustrating marketers do have marketing analytics data, and they are taking advantage of that asset.

At the same time, they face familiar challenges in time and resources. Beyond those challenges, marketers are not fully taking advantage of marketing analytics to really drill down into customer behavior for deeper insights or impact on revenue. The key takeaway is marketers are planning on spending more money and effort on improving marketing analytics activity in 2013.

Download your free excerpt — You will not be asked to fill out a form. This is a direct download.

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