High demand and intense competition drive businesses to work smarter and be more efficient. Being a data-driven organization enables companies to not only survive but also thrive—in order to do this you need to understand how to utilize the data.

We believe Marketing investments should be accountable, and data helps us get there. Before we can assess an investment we need to understand what we’re measuring and, more importantly, why. On top of this, we need to analyze the data, not simply report on it.

Running marketing based on data and analysis is not a new approach, but still, many businesses don’t distinguish between reporting and analyzing.

What is reporting?

It is great that a business tracks performance reports and reviews investments, but this is not enough. Pulling a report is easier than ever. Most platforms such as social media, web tracking, CRM tools, and marketing automation tools have pre-built reports and, in most cases, we don’t need special expertise to pull them. Reporting is as simple as pushing a button in many cases: a report turns raw data to information and displays “what happened” or “what did not”, it does not tell “why it happened”. Understanding the cause & effect is critical, and often overlooked.

The need for analyzing

Analyzing moves beyond reporting. It requires exploring the data and pulling insights and stories; deeper understanding of targets, behaviors, needs, and so on. The goal of analyzing is to identify meaningful insights – understand why something happened and any associated outcomes. Finding the hidden patterns to drive future recommendations.

For instance, we monitored key conversion KPIs for a client in a seasonal business and by digging into the data patterns, we were able to understand the customer’s purchase behavior better, specifically we were able to determine a standard time period between customer engagement and purchase. Knowing this timeline then helped us to adjust our marketing plan for campaign communication and also create new marketing materials aimed at shortening the time period to final purchase.

We can utilize analytics to improve each channel’s performance across marketing funnel stages. By closely monitoring the KPIs in awareness, engagement, and conversion stages to make sure our campaigns are effective from the top to bottom of the funnel. If the numbers are not exactly what we expect, we ask why, review the strategy, and look for an opportunity to optimize.

Analytics at 90

90 was founded on the idea that marketing should be measurable. As a result, we tightly Monitor Campaign Performance and involve analytics at the core of programs to assure we create accountable and insight-driven marketing plans. We use dashboards that are designed to visualize data in the optimal way to facilitate exploring the stories behind the numbers, using these insights from the dashboards are the goal of our analytics process.

Let’s analyze it together.