How do you truly run effective marketing campaigns in the B2B landscape? The potential is endless. A good first step in maximizing returns from a marketing campaign is to devise a plan. With a clear strategy in place, you'll know exactly what you want to achieve, how you will get there and how much it will cost. My overarching advice is to focus on a core marketing strategy and measure that strategy with analytics in order to make actionable decisions for continuous improvement.  Marketers today need to create maximum value with a minimum budget. And yes, marketing analytics can definitely help.

Over my next few blog posts, I plan to discuss the basics of B2B analytics in a series. I decided to take a step back from some of my previous blogs that were more in tune with someone already utilizing analytics, and provide some primary education on this topic. I’ll discuss the type of actionable information gleaned from spending some quality time crunching the numbers, in order to set yourself up for measurement success.

Square One:  What’s web analytics?

Let’s start off with a basic definition. From Wikipedia,” Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.” So what does that mean?  Look at the data from your visitors on your website and analyze this information so you can get some true insights on their behavior. What are they doing? Where are they going? How are they getting there? Are they doing what you wanted them to do?  A huge challenge for B2B marketers is knowing what to measure. The sheer amount of data you’re able to collect can easily be overwhelming.

First, Define the Goals of Your Website

Really, sit back for a moment and answer - why do you have a website?  Sounds like an easy question, but I’ve spoken with many marketers who stumble over the true purpose of their websites. To help put it into a better perspective for my clients, I learned a little piece of advice from my web analytics mentor, Avinash Kaushik, who said “[website] objectives must be DUMB: Doable. Understandable. Manageable. Beneficial.”  Go back to the basics and answer for yourself and for your agency. Ask questions like – Is the purpose of my website to educate and inform a specific audience? To generate leads? To build credibility in key markets? To create brand awareness?

Stay tuned for my next blog where we will dive into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and continue to discuss the awesome journey that is the basics of analytics for B2B marketing.