Marketing can be a bit of a roller coaster. Between the economy, competitor announcements, algorithm changes, and buyer whims, it often feels like “what worked before” is no longer effective.
Savvy marketers stay on top of the changing trends (as much as they can!). They’re also not throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall to see what sticks; they rely on data and marketing analytics.
In this guide, we want to help you think strategically about the role of marketing analytics within your team and your organization as a whole. We want you to stop chasing numbers that don’t matter and data that has gaps.
Instead, we want you to focus on the metrics that truly measure the impact of marketing—from each of your marketing channels to every step of the customer journey, at all stages of company maturity
Build a strong marketing analytics foundation
Sales-led. Revenue-led. Product-led. No matter what kind of “-led” your organization considers itself, marketing sits at an interesting intersection between multiple departments. On the one hand, marketing often has its own goals and metrics. On the other hand, sales, revenue, and customer activation and retention often depend on the strategies a marketing team uses.
Marketing teams across industries face similar conundrums. Record numbers of website visitors don’t translate to higher conversions. Users sign up, but it’s unclear which channels contribute to the highest retention. The team launches a beautiful new set of ads, but which are converting at the highest rate—and what do the converted customers have in common? (Or maybe all of the above?)
But these questions are not unanswerable. Marketing analytics is a practice of collecting and measuring marketing data—and using tools that can offer a clear picture of the path from casual website visitors to valuable paying customers.
Of course, we at Mixpanel, being the pioneers of event analytics, have our own opinions on how to approach marketing analytics. But we also asked marketing leaders and pulled in real-world scenarios for each of these topics. Our goal is to get you thinking about marketing analytics across each of these stages, regardless of where you’re at today.
Mixpanel Marketing Analytics can give your team the data it needs to answer some of these questions, so we include examples based on its full user journey analysis approach. We believe the best marketing comes from a combination of savvy creatives and a deep understanding of customer behavior. And we want all marketers to be able to look at their data and reach an “aha!” moment of knowing exactly what to try next in their strategies.
How can you identify the metrics that measure success?
Marketers love numbers. Numbers represent the results of clever campaigns and precise marketing spend, right?
But just like there’s a disconnect when teams operate in silos, there’s a disconnect when marketing metrics don’t correlate with actual outcomes that move the needle in a business.
Marketing analytics tools can bridge that gap, taking your team from elusive numbers to measurable results. It’s like fitting the last few pieces into a complex puzzle.
But for those final pieces to truly fit, your team must ask the right questions. There are an unlimited number of ways you can slice and dice the numbers, but not all of them answer core business questions.
As a marketing department—and a company as a whole—you need to home in on the right questions. Marketing teams are always asking themselves:
- How do I get more clicks on our website?
- How can I capture more leads?
- Which channels are driving the highest rates of signup conversion?
Oftentimes, these questions can be easily answered and turned into marketing metrics wins. But these are only focus areas for teams who don’t have a unified view of a user’s journey—start to finish. When you consolidate your data from multiple sources and connect the dots on how potential users go on to become longtime customers, your questions become things like:
- What data best signals buyer intent?
- What channels have the best chance of driving active users?
- What pre-signup behavior (or lack thereof) is tied to churn?
If you focus on key metrics that span this unified view (known as a “North Star metric” or “focus metrics”), your team can set tangible goals and measure what really matters. A focus metric is usually tied to the active usage of the product you’re marketing, such as weekly active users (WAU) or monthly active users (MAU). When you home in on usage, it will sum up trends in other metrics, like acquisition and retention.
To learn more about defining your focus metric, check out Mixpanel’s Guide to Product Metrics.
How can you lean into the value moment conversion?
Your product’s value moment is an event, an action, or a series of events and actions representing the moment a user found value in your product. It’s when the lightbulb goes on and the user thinks, “Aha, this is the right product for me!”
Everything—your sales, your revenue, etc.—ultimately revolves around those value moments, and retention depends on the sustained value over time. More value moments mean users have more opportunities to build habits around your website or app.
Whether your focus metric is net new signups, increased customer lifetime value, or higher return on ad spend (ROAS), all roads should point in that direction. You’ll be most successful by driving users to the value moments via the shortest route possible. And you’ll retain users by continuing to show them value along the way.
Product analytics can help you identify your value moments by showing you how users are interacting with your website or app. You can visualize the steps of the conversion journey, whether it ends with a purchase or signing up for a subscription.
And the inverse is also true: You can see that users who never complete certain actions within the website or app end up never making a purchase or canceling.
(And it’s also possible to be surprised by what you find within product analytics. You never know!)
Product analytics needs to be a crucial component of marketing analytics. You’re not guessing or assuming that users convert because of X feature or Y event journey. You’re backing up those “gut instincts” with data and then using that data to drive marketing strategy.
To dig further into product analytics strategies, check out Mixpanel’s Guide to Product Analytics.
Immobiliare, the No. 1 real estate site in Italy, offers a platform for homeowners and renters to find real estate property listings. Immobiliare focuses on a simple metric: how many listings a user views per month.
By using Mixpanel, Immobiliare uncovered that the more filters used during the discovery process, the more likely users would contact an agent. Being able to narrow a search was the value moment. Armed with this information, Immobiliare was able to improve engagement with a 40% increase in views per month.
With Mixpanel Marketing Analytics, you can measure how marketing efforts impact the performance of your value moments, whether through the behavior of newly acquired users or the re-engagement of existing users.
How can you build your marketing strategy around the funnel?
Within your organization, you must consider the correlation between your value moment and your focus metric. One way or another, your value moments—and the percentage of users who reach them and how quickly they get there—will impact your overall success.
Marketing analytics include both zoom-in and zoom-out data points, details and the big picture.
You can zoom in on the exact steps that a user takes to arrive at a value moment. Or you can zoom out to look at the top pages viewed before conversion or identify ad landing pages with high bounce rates.
Mark Kilens, Chief Marketing Officer at Airmeet, says he uses a framework when he thinks about marketing strategy.
- Who is the audience?
- Why would they engage with you?
- Why are you trying to engage with them?
- What do you want them to engage with (an offer, a free product, a piece of content, etc.)?
With this framework, you can develop a marketing strategy that focuses on your larger goals—like the success metrics and value moment conversion—and then look at what tactics are most effective at improving those metrics. Marketing analytics tools like Mixpanel allow you to look at results in real time and pivot tactics if needed.
“You’ve got to look at your overall engagement with the assets you own, the media you own, and the overall engagement your audience is having with your brand and product that you can track,” says Kilens. “Can you connect one of the signals of engagement intent to a person or specific account?”
Using its value moment conversion as a signal, Immobiliare launched an app download campaign that converted more than 50K users out of 220K app downloads. It was a combination of aligning the strategy and a specific campaign tactic.
How can you align foundational goals between teams?
Across your organization, cross-functional teams are more likely to achieve their own key performance indicators (KPIs) when each team’s objective is aligned to pave the path to an organizational goal.
Product teams can enhance the customer experience to drive more users to the value moment conversion. Sales can be armed with messaging that focuses on the known value moment. Customer success can guide customers to the product’s value.
A solid foundation for tracking and measuring success with marketing analytics starts with asking the right questions. From there, you can find the data points that paint an accurate picture of buyer and customer journeys. Optimize for your value moment, iterate with campaigns, and monitor the results.
Marketing analytics is not just about collecting data but about putting the insights to work so you can make more informed decisions. You can fuel your organization’s growth by taking individual department success indicators and unifying them with a data-driven approach.
Understand your channel performance
You know that moment when you’re dating someone and think, “Wow, I really like this person. Wonder if they like me back?” You look for clues that your feelings are reciprocated, analyzing every interaction.
Marketing can feel like the never-ending question: Does the audience like me back? And while it’s not the same as a romantic relationship, you’re still trying to form a connection with an individual person—while also appealing to a large audience.
First impressions matter, a lot. Ad spend aside, it’s the moment when a potential customer decides to learn more or click away (potentially forever). Optimizing for that initial moment of engagement—and deeply understanding the next steps that converted customers take—can help you iterate on your demand generation tactics.
Engaging with potential customers goes beyond merely grabbing their attention. You’ve got to get them to the point of “likes you back,” and that involves finding the connections between quality traffic and conversions.
Marketing analytics and products like Mixpanel can analyze who you reach through campaigns and who actually responds by clicking on an ad or completing the conversion action.
What can you glean from an initial website visit?
Google Analytics has long been the staple for analyzing audiences—looking at page views, sources of traffic, time spent on page, and more.
But the rollout of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has been an endless source of frustration, as many marketing teams can attest. From a difficult migration to a steep learning curve, users have been left wondering how to track their key performance metrics.
Attribution and audience analysis are notoriously complex, and even though GA4 touts them as features, it doesn’t truly solve these challenges. It still relies on black-box attribution models, timeout-based sessions, and pre-defined conversions. And while it can integrate data from Google’s ad network, bringing in ad-network data from other sources (such as Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads) is limited.
To put it simply, GA4 leaves marketers with an incomplete picture. The depth of analysis is missing, so you can’t fully assess your campaigns and make adjustments as needed.
By contrast, Mixpanel Marketing Analytics allows you to enrich your page view and user data with additional first-party data, as well as create custom properties that break down your audience beyond the typical direct, organic, paid, and referral categories. Mixpanel also supports ingesting ad data from all platforms so you can compare clicks, impressions, ad spend, and more.
You can also use Mixpanel’s Cohorts feature to group users who have certain characteristics in common, such as users who are new or all from a certain geographical area. You can use your defined Cohorts in ad campaigns and nurture the group towards a purchase or point them to a resource to encourage a buying decision. You can also use Cohorts to identify expansion opportunities in B2B customers or target customers that prefer discounted items when a new sale is coming up.
With a complete overview of your channel performance and user properties, you can identify where customers are coming from, how much it costs to bring them to your site, and which types of users are more likely to convert.
Why does real-time campaign performance matter?
Unless you have an unlimited budget to create and test marketing campaigns (in which case, congratulations!), you need to monitor campaign performance carefully. Without a close eye on accurate, holistic data from all of your performance marketing channels, you can quickly burn through your ad budget.
When you’re focusing on first impressions, the hours and days after a new campaign launch are critical. You’re not only looking for resonance with the target audience but also potential issues. Remember the intern at HBO Max who accidentally sent out a blank email to the entire subscriber base with the subject line “Integration Test”? Mistakes happen.
If you monitor campaign performance in real time (versus waiting for GA4 data hours later), you can rapidly respond to campaign problems. You also might be A/B testing a campaign, notice a significantly better response to one versus the other, and can adjust your campaigns accordingly. Or perhaps some type of external event causes a rapid shift in campaign performance.
Real-time monitoring improves your return on ad spend. If you focus only on long-term performance, you miss the opportunity to seize your audience’s attention when a campaign takes off in a particular channel.
What are the benefits of tracking an audience across different touchpoints?
Part of the reason that straightforward models of audience tracking fall far short is that the buyer journey is far from straightforward. Dark social impacts aside (like your brand mentions in private channels, emails, word-of-mouth, etc.), your marketing analytics will always be incomplete if you can’t connect the actions a user is taking across different channels and within your website or app.
And that user behavior is incredibly difficult to predict. Someone may begin a checkout process on your mobile site only to abandon it. An Instagram ad draws them back, and now the customer buys a product. Was the person interrupted? Did another ad help the buying decision? Who knows. But that multi-touch attribution is critical to honing in your marketing strategy and measuring effectiveness.
Even companies that collect data in a customer data platform (CDP) can face fragmentation. The consolidation of website activity, app activity, and ad campaigns really pulls everything together, like what companies can do with Mixpanel Marketing Analytics.
Uber Carshare was facing this. “We could look at what people were doing on the website, but we couldn’t compare that to what they were doing in the app. We didn’t know how their initial experiences would affect their lifetime value,” explained Keal Wilson, Growth Marketing Team Leader.
Mixpanel provided improved visibility around the signup process. Uber Carshare users were only able to book a car after they had completed signup. Many were dropping off because they couldn’t make a booking immediately.
After making this connection between visitors and incomplete signups, Uber Carshare’s product team tweaked the flow and allowed users to reserve a trip before signing up as a member. As a result, the number of users booking trips on the app rose to 79%, compared to 50% before.
While understanding the why behind a user’s disjointed journey is important, multi-touch attribution allows you to close some of the gaps—even without getting into a user’s head. Instead, you’re optimizing for patterns of behavior: knowing that if you lead users to certain actions, they’re more likely to convert.
How can you support audience tracking with product analytics?
As Uber Carshare saw, you can build even stronger links by tracking a user’s behavior from the point of conversion to ongoing behavior within your website and app. The initial conversion is a critical first step, and reducing the time to convert is a key component.
This is why product and marketing teams need to work closely together. They have to look for links between the top-of-funnel channels and the moment when a website visitor converts to a paying customer. If you’ve tracked the steps of a user journey before, you know they can bounce around to different product pages or mosey through a free trial without ever hitting that conversion moment.
Combining your website analytics with your product analytics can create clearer paths for your potential customers. That might be focusing your ad spend on channels that lead to higher paying customers or identifying patterns in customers who convert the fastest. Marketing efforts can get them engaged, and the website or app itself can capitalize on that enthusiasm—if you can make the connection between the two.
Identity resolution in Mixpanel creates that link. You can combine pre-login behavior (like website visits) with post-login actions (such as app usage). This can take you from those initial website visits through conversion and ongoing website or app usage.
How can you align audience engagement goals between teams?
“Does this person like me?” (or, in other words, like the product) is a question deeply rooted in emotion, experiences, and external factors. While buyer psychology certainly plays a role, the wide variations in lived experiences can make customer behavior unpredictable.
But you can look for the touchpoints that drive different paths for your target audience. And you can identify emerging patterns when behavior shifts across channels and then adapt accordingly.
Can you create a throughline between the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel? Absolutely. The data exists; it’s simply a matter of bringing it into a single view that both marketing and product teams can rely on.
Get to know your audience
It’s a well-known phenomenon that people are aspirational when they speak. They tell the doctor that they exercise more than they do. They oversell their accomplishments on a resume. And they self-edit when they post photos on social media, showing a filtered version of their lives.
Author and entrepreneur Seth Godin says, “People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.”
When you think about this in a marketing context, it creates a divide between what your audience says they want and what they actually want: the actions they take.
That’s the real trick for marketers. All the market research and customer interviews in the world will be limited by what people say, and maybe even what they think. Real, long-term business success comes from going beyond what people say and focusing on what they do.
How does data tell a story?
Audience segmentation based on what people say will give you traditional buyer personas that rely on demographics, geographical information, income level, and so on. That can be a baseline, particularly before collecting any additional information.
Surveys can take you a step further because now you’re targeting a specific segment of people with questions that serve your business needs. But they still run into the fallacy of what people say, which may contradict their actual intent.
Instead, you need to find the connections between who your buyers are and what they do: which users are taking action and staying engaged.
It’s through these connections that you can tell a strong data story. Like any research, you combine evidence from multiple data sources with a compelling narrative. Users start at Point A, follow a certain path, and end up at Point B. Mixpanel Marketing Analytics examines the full user journey, from initial touchpoints to actions taken within your website or app.
Of course, those paths may be complex, or users may take alternative routes to Point B, but the road is paved by data from the users. It may or may not correlate with a path you’ve already constructed.
Because of this, teams can run into resistance—especially if the data reveals something unexpected. Some people may only like data if it supports an existing narrative, like your team’s carefully crafted buyer personas based on traditional demographic information.
To move past this, teams must embrace a culture of collecting and analyzing data. They need to invest in their own ability to interpret data and learn from it.
Social media management platform Buffer relies on a strong partnership between product and marketing to deliver the best experience to its users. Simon Heaton, Director of Growth and Product Marketing, acknowledges that removing silos takes some effort.
“We also have several cross-functional rituals in place that help build alignment between both teams on key initiatives, like our go-to-market motion or growth strategy,” he says. “Having a well-implemented and trustworthy data strategy is critical for any SaaS or product-led growth (PLG) company. Once that is in place, a product analytics tool like Mixpanel can become the window in assessing the success of your efforts.”
What does the value moment conversion tell you?
Marketing teams could easily bury themselves in data points and the paths buyers take, but you’re ultimately asking a single question: why?
Why do customers take this path?
Why do some customers drop off at this stage and others don’t?
Why do customers keep coming back?
While you can enhance traditional audience segmentation by stages of the buyer journey and get closer to understanding buyer behavior, the real secret sauce comes from the actions that customers take within your app or product. They hit that “aha!” moment where they see the value and determine that what you offer meets their needs.
With that in mind, you can refine your “why”: Why do some customers find value and others don’t? You can then refine your marketing and drive users toward that value moment and remind them of it over time.
Travel ecommerce platform KKday needed a way to track user behavior across its website, mobile site, and mobile app. “Before Mixpanel, we didn’t have the complete map of our user journey. Now that we have full visibility, we can segment our users according to their behavior and better target them,” says Sherry Shih, Product Manager at KKday.
