In the most basic terms, B2B marketing analytics refers to measurement of the marketing effort to determine how to improve the outcome. That outcome could be a variety of things such as, but not limited to:
- Increasing relevance of traffic
- Lower cost per lead
- Better conversion of key landing pages
- More efficient spend of your marketing budget
- Better velocity of the conversion from visitor to lead to MQL to SQL
What it doesn’t mean is that your agency will be providing weekly and monthly performance reports that you can look through at your leisure. Agencies frequently misunderstand what it means to execute analytics. A weekly or even a monthly report on performance by channel is only half the story. Consider the performance report to be the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more under the surface that needs to be looked at to make good marketing decisions.
B2B Marketing Analytics Introduction
B2B marketing analytics is the practice of measuring all marketing efforts with the goal of creating a feedback loop to inform marketing teams of the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of their efforts. The scope of B2B marketing analytics includes measuring traffic, the transition of this traffic to various states including visitors, leads, and qualified leads, and the cost of driving this traffic.
As your B2B SaaS Marketing Agency, here are summaries of the tasks we do under B2B marketing analytics:
1. Increasing relevance of traffic
When we create ad campaigns, we need to understand how this traffic is behaving. The question of whether we are targeting the right audience with the right message can be divided into three parts – the interaction of the audience with the ad, the interaction of the audience with the landing page, and the receptiveness of the audience to calls to action on the page and on the site. If the traffic is relevant and converting well, then all these metrics will be strong. If it isn’t converting well, then each of these metrics needs to be investigated in detail to understand what needs to be changed to improve the traffic-message-interaction flow.
2. Lower cost per lead
As a SaaS marketing agency, we aren’t tied to a particular channel to drive leads. We view the big and the small channels such as Google ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, directories as equal opportunity channels to leverage. So comparing the cost per lead to determine what channel is the most cost-efficient becomes key. We use proprietary tools that helps us get to these answers quickly. So the focus is on deep analytics and action, rather than on pulling the report together.
3. Better conversion of key landing pages
Conventional wisdom says there shouldn’t be too much thought needed to build a landing page. After all for B2B companies, they serve a very specific function – that of convincing the visitor to fill out a form. What complicates matters is that the landing page needs to be built with the audience, channel, campaign and technology used in mind.
For example, if it is going to be accessed primarily on mobile phones, then it shouldn’t have big privacy pop-ups that block the call to action. Such nuances can be the difference between a great landing page and a mediocre one. Making a landing page a strong converting page requires analysis – using Google Analytics, a session replay tool, and channel data. This is a great example of how we differentiate between reporting and analysis. Data analysis is done to find insights that can drive good change. Reports are for including in presentations.
4. Efficient spend of marketing budget
All too often we see reports of competitors bidding on terms that are very expensive. In other cases, clients ask whether the high CPC they are paying is justified. Such answers need a strong grasp on metrics such as cost per lead (CPL), cost per marketing qualified lead (CPMQL), cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and so on. Once your marketing team has access to these numbers, they are easily able to make budgeting decisions that provide the best monetary benefit. This is another area where we as your marketing agency will make a difference and share insights into acquisition cost so you can focus on making decisions and not pulling reports.
5. Better velocity of conversion to SQL
There are so many facets to consider when optimizing marketing. Is the lead acquisition cost effective? Is the quality of leads good? Is the message-audience pairing relevant? One more consideration that advanced B2B SaaS marketing teams use is the velocity at which leads convert to SQLs. Everyone wants bottom line impact quickly.
So if we are delivering leads from LinkedIn at a better value than from Google, then shouldn’t we maximize spend on LinkedIn? Not always. We also need to know how quickly a lead moves through the nurturing funnel from MQL to SQL. To understand that, one needs to look at the data from various segments to identify the independent variables that can predict velocity. This is yet another example of advanced marketing analytics that your B2B marketing agency should be capable of doing.
Effective B2B Marketing Analytics is Critical for Determining ROAS
B2B Marketing analytics is important to measure the performance and return on all marketing efforts. If you’re not actively taking advantage of your marketing analytics, you are wasting valuable data.
By measuring traffic, quality of leads, and overall effectiveness of campaigns, marketers are able to continuously optimize their efforts to save you time and money on your marketing campaigns.
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