Smarter Marketing Decisions with Analytics and Google Cloud

On a daily basis, marketers are tasked with identifying new ways to target customers through campaigns, emails, events, ads, social media, and more. But, how do you know if your marketing strategy is effective and making an impact on sales? This is where marketing analytics can make a huge difference; it’s crucial for companies to understand the value of marketing efforts.

At its core, marketing analytics is the measurement of marketing performance and effectiveness, which provides an understanding of ROI. Leveraging marketing analytics provides marketers with data into what’s working and what’s not working, allowing them to make more informed strategic decisions. With that being said, there is only true value in marketing analytics if the data is analyzed and steps for improvement are put in place.

Here are a few ways you can get started with taking advantage of analytics to make smarter marketing decisions.

Complete Visibility into Your Sales Funnel

It’s always been a challenge for marketers to fully understand how their marketing efforts are contributing to sales. To help with this, Google has announced a strategic partnership with Salesforce. Now, users have the ability to connect information about the progression of their sales opportunities to other data sources, including Google Analytics. The combination of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Google Analytics 360 gives marketers insight into digital analytics and offline sales data all in one place.

Furthermore, with the built-in connection between Analytics 360 and BigQuery, marketers can easily move Sales Cloud data from Analytics 360 into Google Cloud to combine it with other datasets and unlock BigQuery’s powerful tools for identifying insights. This information gives marketers the ability to see which marketing initiatives contribute to closing a deal; additionally, these insights provide the ability to allocate marketing spend to the activities that have the highest rate of return.

Bring Your Data to Life

Data Studio is a data visualization and reporting tool; it is an integral part of the Google Analytics Solution that gives marketers the ability to bring analytics to life with customized reports and dashboards. With pre-built data connectors, it’s easy for teams to combine data sources and process them in Data Studio. The platform provides detailed reports and dashboards to give marketers the power to analyze data in a more actionable format than spreadsheets filled with endless numbers.

Data Studio offers access to all your data – from CSVs, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Sheets, Google BigQuery, and other standard sources. With the built-in collaboration tool in Data Studio, you can work on the same dashboards and reports simultaneously with your team members.

Retain Your Customers

Once you understand which marketing initiatives transform prospects into customers, your next challenge is to retain them! Evaluating your customer analytics helps you understand your customer’s journey and needs. Rather than sifting through hundreds of standard reports, and searching for clues, marketers can now leverage predictive modeling. Google Cloud’s BigQuery allows you to take all your marketing data sources (including Google Analytics, CRM, social media, etc.) and engage Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine to develop new insights. You can predict future buying patterns of your customers and confidently use these predictions to assess your current marketing initiatives with an understanding of what messaging, offers and activities are successful in retaining customers.

How to Get Started

Maven Wave has developed a marketing analytics solution that leverages machine learning, UX and the Google Cloud to help marketers make better decisions. Marketers struggle with understanding what activities improve sales and are a return on investment because they do not have a holistic view of all their data. Maven Wave combines all relevant data sets such as: Google Analytics, social media platforms, business systems, IoT data, etc. to provide marketers with a comprehensive outlook of all activities.

Within Maven Wave’s Action Center, all analytics can be viewed on an easy to digest dashboard that allows marketing teams to analyze reports containing all marketing data. This solution also utilizes Google’s machine learning capabilities to output predictive analytics and suggest adjustments in their advertising spend, such as adjusting AdWords bids based on product inventory. Marketers can rely on this solution to place bids, rather than manually researching keywords and testing which ones are effective. Ultimately, this integration allows marketing teams to make faster and smarter decisions to boost their sales and ROI.

To learn more about how your company can make smarter decisions with marketing analytics, contact us here.