What Advertising Analytics Can Do For Your Business

Insights are the holy grail in marketing. The more actionable they are, the more precise the advertisement campaigns can be tweaked to drive towards campaign KPI.

As more organizations adopt omnichannel marketing, spanning across multiple devices, offline or online channels, the ensuring data being generated has become humongous. In layman’s terms, such datasets may consume terabytes of storage space or more.

With data being available in abundance, it is natural for marketers to lose sight of their efforts across multiple channels – hence advertising analytics. Let’s take a look at the exact advertising analytics definition.

What is Advertising Analytics?

In simpler terms, advertising analytics can be referred to as the use of analytical data and tools that help businesses and marketers efficiently monitor their omnichannel marketing efforts. 

As these data sets offer actionable insights, marketers can use them to reassure that the campaigns they run are targeted to the right audience and use the right medium to do so.

As previously mentioned, organizations never resort to a single marketing channel as their target audiences will be spread across multiple channels. To be more precise, organizations don’t have a choice other than to run cross-channel campaigns as multi-channel customers tend to spend two to four times more than single-channel customers.

Here are some channels that organizations may use for their multi-channel marketing campaigns:

• Display ads and banners
• Emails
• Website (SEO and content marketing)
• Social media
• TV
• Paid ads (PPC and other campaigns), and many more.

As the number of channels increases, marketers have more ways to target their audience and at the same time, more data to embrace. 

For example, a consumer named Jane sees a TV commercial for a new smartphone. Out of curiosity, Jane performs a Google search for the smartphone and clicks on a paid ad – leading her to the manufacturer’s website.

She still hasn’t made her mind about purchasing a new smartphone. On her way to the office, she sees a billboard displaying the features of the smartphone briefly. And once she checks her email, she sees a direct email with a specialized offer for the smartphone.

She may be fully convinced at this point and may go ahead to click on the call-to-action button and order the smartphone. In a quick glance, Jane converted because of the specialized email she received. 

But when considering the whole story, Jane encountered ads via multiple channels before making a decision. And the effectiveness of each complemented each other and led to the conversion. 

Without automated analytics, marketers will have a hard time defining the importance of each channel that leads to conversions – primarily because the data collected is enormous and can be incomprehensible for the human eye.

With advertising analytics, marketers can quickly pinpoint the effectiveness of each channel and tweak their campaigns accordingly. This will also allow marketers to run hyper-targeted campaigns by choosing the right ad inventory from the right ad networks.

According to Harvard Business Review, organizations that adopted advertising analytics witnessed a 10-30% improvement in their overall marketing performance. This is mainly because it enables businesses to effectively reallocate their ad budgets.

In a broader sense, with advertising analytics, organizations can perform three main activities – attribution, optimization, and allocation. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Attribution

Attribution allows organizations to understand the value of each advertising activity and how they complement each other to drive sales. Especially when businesses utilize both offline and online advertising strategies, it will be increasingly difficult to track the results of each without analytics.

Just like the previously discussed example of how a consumer’s purchase decision was affected by ads from multiple channels, in most cases, advertising activities interact with each other to drive results.

This means, evaluating the results based on a single channel (just like saying email marketing was the most effective strategy in the previous example) will undermine the effectiveness of each channel and lead to flawed decision making.

That being said, to gain full accuracy while utilizing digital advertising analytics, companies must be keen to collect data across five main categories as follows,

• Market conditions
• Competitive activities
• Marketing actions
• Consumer response
• Business outcomes

With detailed data sets and well-built tools for analytics, companies can monitor the effectiveness of each advertising campaign as well as their impacts on each other. For instance,  similar to the previous example, a TV ad may lead to a sudden spike in website traffic via click-through ads.

Optimization

Once organizations have measured the contribution and relative contribution of each advertising channel, they need to optimize their efforts for better results.

This involves the use of predictive analytics to determine the outcomes of business decisions such as what will happen to sales if you cut down 10% of paid search advertising or how will investing 15% more in TV commercials affect the sales.

Almost every big name in the industry uses advanced analytics to optimize their ad strategies, and one example of that is the Ford Motor Company. Using advertising analytics, Ford discovered that it was underinvesting in search and over-emphasizing in digital display ads.

Predictive analytics also helped Ford realize how investing more in social media campaigns and reducing their spending in traditional media advertising would affect vehicle sales to young drivers.

With the help of historical sales-marketing data and by reviewing the advertising behavior of competitors, organizations can accurately predict the best ad strategies for upcoming products, even before they hit the market – allowing them to proactively allocate budgets for varying ad inventories.

Allocation

In the initial days of online advertising, marketers may have to wait for the budget on a particular channel to be “exhausted” before they could tweak or move on to another strategy – often referred to as the run and done approach.

But things are far different now. Marketers can monitor, tweak or allocate their ad dollars almost instantly. With the help of advertising analytics, the process of allocation is much more streamlined and result-driven.

Marketers can now rely on the results of attribution and predictive analytics to measure outcomes and proactively allocate resources. This will also enable marketers to reallocate their ad dollars without losing sight of sales and profit.

Benefits of Advertising Analytics

Apart from the above discussed, here are some of the notable benefits of using advertising analytics.

• It helps in making informed, data-driven decisions to allocate ad dollars.
• It assists marketers with the consolidation of data from multiple sources.
• It helps in identifying and eliminating ineffective advertising spends.
• It allows marketers to identify the market trends that shape users’ online behavior – thereby allowing them to tweak their strategies and introduce complementing creatives.
• It will enable marketers to monitor every critical key performance indicator (KPIs) of campaigns.
• It will allow businesses to effectively perform cross-channel retargeting – which is the use of two or more channels to enhance the performance of ad campaigns.
• It will enable marketers to view reports with the click of a button (ROI reports, lead reports, and so on)
• It helps in maintaining relevancy by identifying the time slots that drive more traffic to a particular ad inventory – thereby reducing the costs.
• As it offers real-time reports, marketers can continually tweak their campaigns to drive maximum conversions.
• It provides data visualization – which makes it easier for non-technical marketers to better understand the insights.

Tools for Advertising Analytics

These tools are platforms that allow marketers to understand the overall effectiveness of their campaigns from the enormous sets of data collected. 

These tools help businesses identify new opportunities to maximize their advertising return on investment (ROI) and eliminate ineffective advertising inventories or channels. 

And most importantly, advertising analytics tools or cross-channel reporting tools give marketers a better understanding of the relation between different advertising channels, the content that results in higher conversion rates, and the factors that cause a customer to convert.

If you are looking for an all-encompassing analytics solution, Knorex XPO is an ideal choice. With Knorex XPO powered by KAIROS AI engine, marketers and agencies will gain a competitive advantage in,

• Predictive Analytics – By analyzing huge sets of historical and behavioral data, KAIROS can help marketers refine their campaign strategies and target the right audiences.
• Cross Channel Auto-Optimization – KAIROS offers hands-free budget optimization across multiple ad channels.
• Smart Bid Recommendations – KAIROS suggests the optimal bidding prices to achieve more views, clicks, and conversions.
• Smart Fixes – Instead of notifications, KAIROS will indicate where and how to troubleshoot an error.

For more information about Knorex KAIROS and how it can help marketers enhance their advertising campaigns, visit www.knorex.com/knorex-kairos. 

Conclusion

When organizations have multiple ad channels to manage and experiment with, the data collected from each can be quite overwhelming for marketers to handle, let alone comprehensible. That’s where advertising analytics can do wonders.

Along with actionable insights, advertising analytics can enable marketers to get a “bird’s eye view” of the overall performance of ad campaigns. Fortunately, marketing platforms like Knorex XPO make it easier to track the interactions between each channel and their contribution to the total advertising ROI.