Common Marketing and Product Development Questions That Analytics Can Answer

Thanks to the explosion of technological consumer adoption over the last twenty years, marketers and product developers have more ways than ever to learn about and interact with their customers. After woefully lagging for almost a decade, improvements in computing power and mass storage space finally made big data possible, and the entire field of web analytics along with it. Without question, web analytics is the justification for almost all types of spending, from marketing to research and product development.

marketing analytics

Web analytics for marketing

Global analytics help brands and companies learn about their customers before they have even bought anything. Brands can now benefit from:

Interest-based data: what kind of things does your target customer like?
Purchasing history: what products have they bought on Amazon?
Social influence: who do they follow and interact with?
Geography: what time zone are they in? Which languages do they speak?
Location-based data: where do they get their coffee? Do they go to the gym?

Analytics helps marketers to narrow down decisions in order to optimize strategies and resources. Then, analytics follows the entire operation to determine how well it worked and change parts as needed depending on the results. Marketers can unlock deeper understandings of:

Who interacted with my promotion?
Where did they come from?
How frequently do they interact with it?
How long does it take to go from trigger to action?
How many people does my landing page convert?
Which call to actions are performing the best?

Analytics for product development

Like marketers, product developers benefit from a deeper understanding of what people actually do when they use a particular product. Analytics is one of the most important indicators to creating the best possible experience, and it should guide strategy from beginning to end. Product developers can use analytics to understand:

Which feature is the most popular? Which is the least?
How quickly do people learn how to use the app correctly?
Which product changes increased usage? Which ones caused it to decrease?
How many people are telling other people about this product?
Where are people bouncing from?
Which cohorts have the best retention?

Big Data

Analytics gets really interesting when we combine different data sets to zero in on increasingly specific areas and unlock new insights into the causation of marketing and product efforts. For major companies, these “small” areas of focus can mean big improvements to the bottom line. Questions can be as specific as:

How many Hungarians bought our product right before Christmas?
How many Instagram photos do my customers post on Saturday nights?
What percent of people in Peoria, Illinois have ever bought a used car online?
Which journalist drives the most traffic to me over time?
How many Clint Eastwood films have the dads of my target audience watched on Netflix?
Which of my mobile apps (Android, iOS, Windows) are driving the most engagement?
How tall are all of my ex’s boyfriends?

Kidding aside, it’s a great time to be in analytics, and with Forrester reporting over 70% of major companies (w/ +1,000 employees) who have analytics strategies in place, along with almost a thousand analytics services that have been created, all because it’s showing companies how to do their business better.

If you know someone who might benefit from this brief list of questions, please feel free to share! Or you can contact me directly if you like! Thanks!