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In the modern world of business, marketing teams are often overwhelmed by data.
Analytics platforms fulfill an important role as they help transform raw data into insights that can be easily understood and actioned by stakeholders across the business.
But for any marketing analytics platform to be effective, the people using them need to know how to get the most out of it.
There are many guides on how to write SQL queries for BigQuery, how to create effective data stories in Tableau, how to set up custom conversions in Google Analytics, and how to create calculated columns in Power BI.
However, these guides often overlook the importance of ensuring that any analytics platform is fuelled by accurate, consistent, and timely data.
In this article, we’ll explore the key to getting the most out of your analytics platform: data quality and freshness and the steps you can take to achieve this.
Ensure you’re working from a foundation of high-quality data
Before diving into the various features and capabilities of your chosen data analytics and insights platform, your first step should be to make sure you have a solid foundation of high-quality data.
By investing in data quality from the start, you can be confident that your marketing analytics platform delivers reliable, actionable insights to drive better decision-making and improve your marketing performance.
Let's take a closer look at the factors you should consider to prioritize the quality of your marketing data.
Use automation to avoid manual errors
Despite the widespread acceptance that we’re now in the age of automation, a surprising number of businesses still rely on manual integration to power their marketing analytics and data visualization platforms.
While manual integration might be feasible for small businesses with two or three data sources, it becomes inefficient and less viable as businesses scale.
The time it takes to integrate multiple marketing data sources manually can mean that data is only refreshed once or twice each week - so businesses using a manual approach to consolidate data are often not working from the most recent performance data.
Manual integration also involves data governance considerations, as exporting and manipulating data from multiple sources presents a potential security risk.
But perhaps the biggest issue with the manual data integration process is the potential for human error. All it takes is copying and pasting data into the wrong column, and the data that powers your analytics platform is compromised.
An automated data integration platform solves all these issues, providing a more scalable, secure, timely, and accurate way to extract and transform your marketing data before loading it into your analytics platform.
By moving away from manual integration and embracing automation, businesses can significantly improve the quality and reliability of their marketing data - enabling marketing analytics platforms to deliver more accurate, trustworthy insights.
Consolidate data from all your marketing sources
For your marketing analytics platform to provide optimal value, it needs to be able to include data from each of your different marketing sources for comparison and analysis.
If you’ve taken our advice and decided against manual data integration, you might be tempted by the promise of some advanced analytics platforms that allow you to directly pull in the data held in each of your different marketing channels.
But this approach is rarely advisable.
The first issue is that it's common for analytics platforms to have connectors for only the most popular marketing channels. So, you might be okay if you’re only running Google Ads and Meta Ads. But if you’re managing marketing activity on newer, more innovative platforms, you might find yourself unable to import data without manual work.
However, perhaps the larger issue is directly importing data that hasn’t been effectively transformed and standardized to ensure consistency. This can lead to differences in currencies, date formats, and even how certain metrics are calculated, resulting in inaccurate comparisons between channels within your marketing analytics platform.
A more effective and accurate solution is to use a data integration platform to create a single source of truth from your data and use this centralized database as the source for your marketing analytics.
Leading data integration platforms like Adverity can connect to more than 600 different marketing data sources out of the box, and also offer you the ability to code custom connectors for unique business data.
Data integration platforms also have data transformation capabilities and advanced features that allow you to ensure the consistency and standardization of your data. This gives your business the complete peace of mind that you really are comparing ‘apples with apples’ within your marketing analytics platform.
Tailor your data to the needs of your business
Consolidating and standardizing your data is an essential step before sending it to your marketing analytics platform.
However, this alone doesn't allow you to access the true power of your data.
Data enrichment allows you to enhance your data to meet the specific needs of your business, and unlock fresh insights through your marketing analytics platform.
For example, by joining datasets from different marketing sources based on a unique identifier in a campaign name, you can quickly and easily power campaign-level cross-channel reports within your marketing analytics platform.
There’s no need for complex data manipulation within your analytics solution, enabling you to quickly and easily gain a holistic view of your campaign-specific cross-channel marketing efforts and identify opportunities for improvement.
Adverity's data enrichment capabilities empower proactive marketers to take control of their data, ensuring it’s exactly how they need it to unlock unique insights.
Enable insights from the most recent data
The world of online marketing can move quickly, and making decisions based on what happened last month or even last week is likely to result in missed opportunities and weaker marketing performance.
To fully benefit from your marketing analytics platform, you need to power it with the most recent data.
Fresh, real-time data empowers your marketing team to be more agile and responsive.
It allows you to identify trends and address any issues as soon as they occur, rather than becoming aware of a trend after it’s passed or flagging an issue after it has impacted business performance.
Leading data integration platforms can provide your marketing analytics platform with near real-time data, fetching data as often as every 15 minutes to ensure you never miss an opportunity or threat.
Cater to the needs of your audience
When maximizing your marketing analytics platform, it’s important to consider all your business’s stakeholders.
Different stakeholders are likely to have different data analysis needs, and it’s important to be able to accommodate these different needs and use cases.
For example, your CMO may need a high-level, strategic view of key performance indicators to help keep a top-level view of things and prepare board reports.
On the other hand, the team members responsible for day-to-day optimizations will require more granular insights to help them improve the ongoing performance of campaigns.
So, it’s important to choose a marketing analytics solution that offers the flexibility to create customized reports and dashboards and ensures that you have the necessary internal knowledge to create these custom views.
This helps ensure that everyone has access to the data they need for their specific roles and responsibilities and ultimately leads to better decision-making and improved marketing performance.
Identify and report on the right KPIs
With an abundance of data available to marketing teams, it can be easy to get distracted by vanity metrics that don’t have a meaningful business impact.
To ensure efficient use of your marketing analytics platform, it’s important to configure reports and dashboards to focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your marketing optimization efforts.
The choice of KPIs will vary from business to business, but they should always align with your overarching goals and objectives.
For many performance marketing teams, this often means less focus on things like reach, impressions, and likes on your posts and more focus on metrics like cost per click, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition.
By prioritizing the right KPIs, you can avoid distractions in your marketing analytics dashboards, allowing you to focus on the insights that will have the greatest impact.
Use effective visualizations
Modern marketers often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available to them.
With ongoing pressure to make fast, informed decisions, the ability to visualize data effectively for faster analysis and decision-making is more important than ever.
Transforming your data into easy-to-understand visuals can help marketing teams quickly identify trends, threats, and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed, helping to improve marketing performance.
So, to get the most benefit from your marketing analytics platform, it's crucial to choose a solution with robust data visualization capabilities.
However, not all marketing analytics platforms are created equal when it comes to visualizations.
Some solutions like Tableau excel in data visualization and offer a wide range of customizable charts and graphs that you can configure and share with other team members. However, Tableau might not be as strong as other solutions in other areas of marketing analytics. For example, Power BI's data modeling and manipulation features make it better equipped to handle complex, tabulated data - and its integration with Microsoft Copilot and other Microsoft products might make it the sensible choice for some businesses.
To truly get the most out of your analytics platform, it's important to choose a solution that aligns with your specific needs and goals.
Unlock the power of your marketing analytics platform with Adverity
Marketing analytics platforms are essential for turning raw data into actionable insights.
But if your analytics platform is being fuelled by poor-quality data, you're never going to achieve the valuable marketing insights you need to improve performance.
Adverity can help ensure that your marketing analytics platform is powered by accurate, consistent, real-time data that can help empower better marketing decision-making to drive business growth.
Curious to find out more about how Adverity can help?
Read about how Deutsche Bahn worked with Adverity to enhance the efficiency of their marketing analytics, or book a demo today.
