The business benefits of cross-channel measurement & analytics

As marketers and analysts, one of the most important aspects of any of our activities is the ability to accurately track how they contribute to our business’ bottom line. Being able to clearly identify the source or channel through which a business inquiry was generated was particularly difficult – making it difficult, by extension, to prove the ROI of any marketing activity.

Cross-channel analytics provides marketers with exactly that.

By utilizing all of your marketing data, cross-channel measurement and analytics enable businesses to clearly visualize the path a customer takes to conversion, analyzing customer behavior and interaction, which allows them to identify what channels drive conversions, popular conversion paths both in and across channels, and a detailed evaluation of specific paths.

By incorporating cross-channel measurement and analytics into the overall marketing mix, businesses can develop a granular understanding of how each channel contributes to the bottom line – their overall marketing ROI – and how these individual channels all come together.

Ideally, you want to be in a position where you can confidently tell your CEO and board of directors the conversion ratios involved at every stage of your sales funnel; for example:

• Web visits
• Landing pageviews
• Leads/contacts generated
• Marketing qualified leads
• Sales qualified leads
• Opportunities
• Closed/won business

In addition, beyond reporting on these conversion ratios, you want to be able to attribute the values to the individual channels within your marketing regime – and with a tremendous level of granularity.

With cross-channel reporting, you can perform:

• Funnel analysis: With cross-channel reporting, you can determine which channels, or combination of channels, provide your business with the highest returns. Cross-channel reporting can also provide you with a great deal of visibility into what paths lead to conversion. This is vital since, in today’s world, your website visitor is likely to click on multiple links, pages, and content before they convert. With this level of insight and the data you have accumulated, you can redirect your marketing resources and spend to target the channels which are most effective at driving conversions and sales.
• Channel relationship analysis: Because of the comparative nature of cross-channel reporting, you can quickly develop a better understanding of the relationship between each of your marketing channels. Many questions can be answered with hard data, such as: What content do people engage with and when? What process do people go through before converting? What messages deliver the best engagement rates?
• Predictive modeling: As your data pool grows and your analytical cross-channel reporting improves, you will gradually be able to construct predictive models which a) highlight the impact of your marketing on the revenue generated/spent and b) allow you to alter your marketing mix on the fly to capture prospects earlier in the buyer’s journey. 

All of this will allow you to better understand your marketing activity internationally and start attributing value to specific aspects or marketing channels. Having this level of granularity is absolutely essential and will enable you to improve your campaigns significantly as you begin to analyze your performance across the board.

If you want to learn more about international ROI reporting, cross-channel measurement & analytics and comparative reporting, please download our free eBook by clicking here.