Every successful marketing strategy needs to have clear KPIs in place. Measurable, relevant performance indicators are essential for understanding how effective your marketing efforts are. Without setting the right KPIs, and measuring them properly, your marketing strategy will not be optimized for success.
Many businesses get the first part right by setting their KPIs. However, knowing how these are being achieved is something that loads of businesses get wrong. If you really want to drive up the value of your marketing strategy, then you will need to understand how specific marketing channels are contributing to your KPIs. This is necessary for knowing which marketing investments add the most value to your business, and which areas need optimizing.
Using the right marketing analytics is the only way to really understand this. Here are five ways to better understand which marketing channels are impacting your KPIs.
1. Data and Marketing Analytics
Good KPIs need to be measurable, and you need marketing analytics to measure these results. Let’s say you want to know how much traffic is being sent to your website from your Facebook page. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to help you understand data like this. The platform provides a clear insight into this traffic, which you can use to measure the success of your KPI.
Understanding marketing analytics and regularly tracking your analytics is the only way to know how your KPIs are performing. For best results, checking data and marketing analytics needs to be done on a regular basis. This allows businesses to draw regular, meaningful insights that can be compared to previous insights. For example, you can measure your traffic from your Facebook page each month, to see how this KPI performs over the long term.
Because of this, no marketing strategy is complete without the effective use of marketing analytics. Every channel that you use for marketing should have its own analytics platform, offering you insights into how each channel is performing. Data-driven marketers need to monitor these insights carefully in order to understand the effects of each channel.
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2. Having the Right Insights
Marketing analytics covers a broad area, and your business needs to be following the right insights if it wants to understand the impact different marketing channels have on KPIs. Yes, platforms like Google Analytics offer a lot of useful data that you can follow. However, this data is limited and doesn’t give you a complete understanding of your marketing performance.
To be able to gain a more useful understanding of how specific marketing channels contribute to KPIs, businesses need to be using the right analytics tool. A platform like Proof offers valuable data insights that you aren’t able to achieve from standard analytics platforms. This allows you to track highly specific results from each marketing channel, to understand their exact impact on your KPIs.
Being able to use the right insights allows you to really refine your understanding of each marketing channel and how it’s affecting your KPIs. This approach will also help you to make more calculated business decisions going forward, instead of just offering historical data.
3. Identifying the Right Metrics
In order to understand how different marketing channels contribute to your KPIs, you need to identify the right metrics to follow. These need to be as specific as possible to help you refine your analytics results for complete accuracy. Understanding what kind of impact each metric has will help you to understand how your different marketing channels are affecting your KPIs.
Let’s use a landing page as an example. Some metrics that could apply to your landing page include bounce rate, conversion rate, close rate, impressions, visit length, and more. If your KPI is looking at the conversion rate of this landing page, then you don’t need to worry about metrics like visit length or impressions.
Knowing which specific metrics to follow can get confusing for more complicated KPIs and channel measurements. This is why having a single marketing analytics platform will help you to discover easier, and more accurate results.
4. Understand Cause and Effect Relationships
In marketing, cause and effect relationships refer to how one event is related to a previous event. When understanding the marketing performance of each channel, you need to have accurate cause and effect insights from each channel. Your aim isn’t to just understand the final result of a certain channel, but how that result occurred.
Understanding cause and effect relationships in marketing give you a bigger picture of what’s really going on in your marketing mix. This is something that many marketing analytics platforms aren’t able to accurately provide insights on.
Marketers need to understand the detailed chain of events that resulted in each event, and what kind of events occurred to produce certain outcomes with each marketing channel. This is the only way to understand the true impact of each marketing channel on your KPIs.
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5. Accurate Reporting
Finding insights is one step, the next step is reporting on them. Once you have identified the right insights and found the relevant marketing analytics, you will need to report on this. Clearly laying out findings and being able to follow your insights is the only way to track the performance of each channel.
Marketing analytics reports need to be done on a fixed, regular basis so that comparisons can be made from them. Complaining a single report won’t help marketers to understand how their KPIs are performing, as results are always changing. Reviewing analytics each week will provide a more accurate insight into how each marketing channel is actually affecting your KPIs.
Conclusion
Setting KPIs and monitoring them is important for any business. To understand the true value of any marketing strategy, it’s also important to know exactly how each marketing channel is affecting each KPI. Having accurate results on this will help marketers to make smarter decisions based on real data.
Proof offers advanced analytics and the right insights to help businesses create more value with each marketing investment. 
to see how your business can use Proof to optimize its KPI journey.