Marketing Analytics.

If your marketing manager can’t quickly give you an analytics breakdown for any stage of your sales funnel, if you have no idea how much a lead costs you, or if you’re not seeing trends in the quality and quantity of your target traffic or search rankings, you might want to ask yourself whether your marketing is actually working as well as it should.

These days, you can’t stay competitive without fast, accurate marketing analytics. It helps you in so many ways:

• Objectively evaluate results

• See your marketing ROI

• Build well-founded forecasts

• Set the right priorities

• Manage your team and budget effectively

For me, working without analytics is impossible - it’s like flying blind. At the same time, I understand that building a complete marketing analytics system from scratch is time-consuming. That’s why I often started with simple reports in Excel or Google Sheets. Those basic reports covered the fundamental needs and allowed for informed decision-making.

Besides that, tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), if set up correctly, let you get a lot of useful data out-of-the-box about your website or app users, traffic quality, conversions, and so on. I care less about fancy report visuals and more about flexibility, so I create custom reports in GA4 (using Explorations), and later I move the most important ones into Looker for broader sharing.

Implementing more complex tools - like a CRM system - takes time and resources. However, without a CRM, it’s impossible to scale a business development team’s work while maintaining quality. Unfortunately, there aren’t many solutions that combine a robust CRM with powerful analytics. Over my career I’ve worked with Zoho, HubSpot, Pardot, Salesforce, and a few custom CRMs. Usually, the built-in analytics in these systems are pretty limited. Still, they’re good enough for quickly tracking the state of the sales funnel.

When it comes to large, successful companies that are market leaders in highly competitive environments, all these analytics tools by themselves aren’t enough. In projects like those, I’ve built complex Business Intelligence (BI) systems on platforms like Microsoft Power BI. The big advantage of a BI system is that it brings together data from different sources (CRM, GA4, Ahrefs, product analytics, financial analytics, Atlassian, etc.) into a centralized data warehouse. This makes it possible to analyze complex relationships between data that you just can’t see when looking at each source separately. This approach is what provides the deep insights needed to compete with strong competitors in tough markets.

Which marketing metrics do I track? That depends on several factors, such as:

• The project’s business model

• Its lifecycle stage 

• The marketing channels and demand generation strategies in use

• The volume and quality of the data collected

There’s no one-size-fits-all set of metrics for every business. You have to make that choice based on experience and knowledge of what matters for your specific situation.

How much will it cost to build out marketing analytics for you? In business development teams of up to 20 people, I don’t see a need for a dedicated Marketing Analyst role. I usually handle those functions myself (sometimes with help from team members). In larger teams, and especially when building comprehensive BI systems, it becomes necessary to bring in a professional Data Analyst for support.