Marketing analytics is the process of tracking and analyzing data from marketing efforts, often to reach a quantitative goal. Insights gleaned from marketing analytics can enable organizations to improve their customer experiences, increase the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts, and craft future marketing strategies.

Different Sources of Marketing Data

The data you use to track progress toward goals, gain customer insights, and drive strategic decisions must first be collected, aggregated, and organized. There are three types of customer data: first-party, second-party, and third-party.

First-party data is collected directly from your users by your organization. It’s considered the most valuable data type because you receive information about how your audience behaves, thinks, and feels.

Second-party data is data that’s shared by another organization about its customers (or its first-party data). It can be useful if your audience types are the same or have similar demographics, if your companies are running a promotion together, or if you have a partnership.

Third-party data is data that’s been collected and rented or sold by organizations that don’t have a connection to your company or users. Although it’s gathered in large volumes and can provide information about users similar to yours, third-party data isn’t the most reliable because it doesn’t come from your customers or a trusted second-party source.
While it’s important to know that second- and third-party sources exist, first-party data is the most reliable of the three because it comes directly from your customers and speaks to their behaviors, beliefs, and feelings. Here are some ways to collect first-party data.

Surveys

Surveying your current and potential customers is a straightforward way to ask them about their experiences with your product, their reason for purchasing, what could be improved, and if they’d recommend your product to someone else—the possibilities are endless. Surveys can be anything from multi-question interviews to a popup asking the user to rate their experience on your website.

A/B Tests

An A/B test is a way of testing a hypothesis by comparing user interactions with a changed version of your website or product to an unchanged version. For instance, if you hypothesize that users would be more likely to click a button on your site if it were blue instead of red, you could set up an A/B test in which half of your users see a red button (the control group) and half see a blue button (the test group). The data collected from the two groups’ interactions would show if your hypothesis was correct. A/B tests can be a great way to test ideas and gather behavioral data.

Organic Content Interaction

Interaction with organic content—such as blog posts, downloadable offers, emails, social media posts, podcasts, and videos—can be tracked and leveraged to understand a user’s purchasing motivation, their stage in the marketing funnel, and what types of content they’re interested in.

Paid Advertisement Interaction

You can also track when someone engages with a digital ad you’ve paid to display, whether it’s on another website, at the top of search results, or sponsoring another brand’s content. This data is crucial in determining where your customers are coming from and what stage of the funnel they see your ads.