Why data analytics is important for businesses.
Before we jump into the why, let’s first look at exactly what data analytics are. Data analytics is a quantitative measurement of the performance of online content consumption, including advertising campaigns, social media, and websites. It provides a clear vision to the organization on how users or customers are behaving.
Now let’s answer why data analytics is important for businesses. Through data analytics, companies can get insights into how their marketing efforts are performing. They can then employ web analytics services to optimize their marketing strategy in real time and adjust to make sure they’re getting the ROI they’re looking for.
There’s where web analytics consultants can also step in. They’ll evaluate the data and help draw useful insights into how your marketing efforts are performing. The bottom line here is that data analytics can help you increase ROI and find marketing efficiencies across many practices.
What is digital analytics?
Similar to data analytics, let’s look at exactly what is digital analytics. Digital analytics is the process of analyzing digital data from various sources like websites, mobile apps, emails, online ads, video ads, articles, and more. Marketing analytics firms then take that data, and help marketers come up with, or optimize their plans.
It’s an integral part of a robust digital marketing strategy. It’s also a central tenet of account-based marketing, a marketing strategy that employs in-depth company-level analytics to help inform strategic decisions.
Why an analytics-first digital agency could be right for you.
As stated above, being analytics-first is good for business. It can increase your ROI, and give business decision-makers peace of mind that their strategy is sound. But what kind of analytics-first digital agency is right for you? A Google analytics agency focuses on the tech giant’s proprietary analytics services (i.e., GA4 and/or BigQuery) to draw conclusions. Meanwhile, a true data science agency could pull from more sources and help to model the data in aggregate to form a clearer picture.
One isn’t inherently better than the other (in fact there’s often quite a bit of overlap); it’s more about what you’re looking to get out of the agency. If you’re primarily living within the Google Analytics ecosystem, then a Google analytics agency would make sense. If you’re looking to pull broader data and build analytics maturity within your company, then a data science agency could be the way to go for your use case.
Either way, it’s important to evaluate your goals and what you hope to get out of an analytics-first digital agency before you take the plunge.
Does a B2B web analytics agency handle analytics differently?
When it comes to digital analytics, whether it’s in the B2B space, or just regular digital marketing agency analytics, you want an expert on your side. The difference between B2B and B2C might not look like much when you see raw analytics numbers themselves, but that’s why you need an expert team to help discern the differences.
They’ll be able to hone in on the right B2B insights that a consumer-focused agency might miss. A B2B web analytics agency will understand the nuances of the B2B space better than an all-purpose agency, giving them an edge when it comes to that niche space. Critically, B2B journeys are significantly more complex, usually longer, and consist of far more decision-makers than a simple B2C purchase. This requires a more granular, advanced tracking solution to evaluate content performance and understand what marketing efforts are truly driving closed/won outcomes.
Are all marketing analytics firms the same?
The short answer is no. The long answer is that they’ll have a lot in common fundamentally. They’re all looking at large swathes of data to gain insight into a specific industry and derive strategic insights from the results. For example, any good digital and social analytics ad agency should be able to tell you if your paid marketing strategy is sound based on hard data. If they can’t demonstrate this based on solid numbers, or they are drawing simplistic conclusions based on basic methods like last-click attribution, say thank you and move on.
You’re in the market for business insights, and whoever gives it to you should be basing those recommendations on observed data trends, not simplistic pulls from an unconfigured GA4 instance. This is doubly true for B2B, which virtually requires the use of advanced analytics to understand the influence of various marketing touchpoints on the buyer journey (which could be 12 months or even longer).
Like BOL, for example. We know a thing or two about data and analytics, especially in the B2B space. We’re helping clients track the buying journey for their TAL and other ICPs using true closed-loop data that leverages critical information from their CRM. Check out our case study below.
At the end of the day, when you’re looking to bring in a digital analytics agency, you need to be confident they have the expertise to collect and analyze the right data for your specific needs. Click the link below and get in touch, we’d love to talk to you about your needs and how our decades of experience can be a fit for you.