If you want to know how well your marketing efforts are doing and identify areas needing improvement, analytics are key. Interpreting marketing analytics is integral to improving ROI and gaining insight into how your campaigns are performing. Unfortunately, most businesses struggle with making sense of data in a way that will improve their bottom line. 

Here are six tips for understanding your marketing analytics and improving ROI.

Establish a Marketing Objective

The first step in increasing ROI through marketing analytics is to establish a specific objective and corresponding success metrics. What is it you want to achieve with your campaigns?

For example, you might want to increase traffic to a particular landing page, while another campaign's objective might be to increase conversions. From there, you can decide on the digital metrics you would look at to measure your campaigns' success as they relate to your objectives. In turn, you would use those metrics to determine whether your marketing efforts are achieving the desired results. If your actions aren't helping you meet your objective, you may need to adjust your campaigns or consider an alternate tactic.

Set ROI Goals

In addition to a clear marketing objective, you need to have a well-defined goal for planning and tracking progress. Otherwise, you won't be able to keep tabs on your campaigns to ensure they're truly worth the investment. 

Like other goals, your ROI goals should be SMART if you want to achieve them. SMART goals, as the acronym lists, are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant (and realistic), and time-based. Marketers who set specific goals, including ROI goals, are around 376% more likely to succeed than marketers without such plans in place.

When setting goals for ROI, determine if they're achievable and that they're clearly defined. What profits are you looking to generate, and are they obtainable based on past campaigns' performance?

Focus on Metrics That Matter

With objectives and ROI goals in place, you can select the metrics that help you measure your campaigns' success. It's important to choose metrics that reflect progress toward goals and avoid tracking vanity metrics that merely look good. For instance, if your goal is to increase traffic to your website and increase overall conversions, seeing thousands of impressions for those ads may be superficially impressive. However, that number won't reflect the ad's ability to generate traffic or conversions.

Create an ROI Tracking Plan

If you don't effectively track ROI, you won't learn whether your campaigns are successful. The metrics you look at to measure success will depend on the goals you have in place and the type of campaign you're running.

If you're launching an email marketing campaign, for example, the metrics to focus on will usually include open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates. If you have a high number of opens but low click-through rates, you may need to make changes to the content of your emails or improve targeting. On the other hand, if you see high open and click-through rates, but the bounce rate on the corresponding landing page is also high, you will need to make changes to the landing page. In the process, these metrics allow you to track the campaign’s ROI effectively.

Determine how often you should review your analytics and perform potential optimizations, which will ensure you maximize your ROI.

Use Analytics Tools

Marketing automation technology continues to grow exponentially and is projected to reach $6.4 billion by 2024. This is largely because many tools out there are being used to automate marketing processes in several ways. The right tools can help increase the efficiency and precision of your marketing campaigns to further boost ROI.

Tools available today can help:

• Handle repetitive tasks
• Personalize content
• Track leads
• Segment audiences
• Analyze data 

Experiment with Tactics

Don't be afraid to experiment with different marketing tactics to find out what works best for you. Experimenting can help refine campaigns and boost ROI as you test new techniques and approaches.

A/B testing, or split testing, is a reliable testing method for marketers. You can use it to show two different variations of an ad or other marketing materials to determine which yields better results. You can then ditch the least effective and implement the one geared for success. The best-performing tactics can subsequently become key components of your campaigns to improve ROI.

Work with a Media Partner to Measure and Improve ROI

Keeping each of these tips in mind can help you establish clear objectives and goals, along with metrics and tracking plans that help you get the most from your marketing. With a better understanding of your campaigns' performance and analytics, you can work toward increasing ROI. One of the best ways to ensure success is to work with an experienced media partner. With a reliable media partner behind your campaigns, you can benefit from a full understanding of data and significantly improved ROI.