9 Tools Marketers Need to Help Accurately Measure Digital ROI

The ability to track the returns on digital investments is crucial in marketing. We discuss nine technologies that should be in marketers’ toolboxes.

Seventy-three percent of marketers currently use a Web analytics technology, such as Google Universal Analytics or Adobe Analytics (metric via DialogTech State of Marketing Measurement). Tools like these allow users to track visitors’ activity on their Websites, their referring source, when they left and a host of other data points. This information can be used to improve site content and optimize how consumers interact with a Website.

Sixty-two percent of marketers plan to increase their investments in search marketing this year (metric from Salesforce). Bid-management platforms, such as Kenshoo, DoubleClick and Marin Software, help marketers accomplish this. Users are able to select the best keywords and optimize click-through rates and conversions for the ones driving engagement and revenue. If users include paid search advertising in their marketing campaigns, a bid-management tool is the best way to improve ROI.

Fifty-four percent of marketers rate CRM tools as critical to creating a cohesive customer journey (metric via Salesforce). CRM systems such as Salesforce.com and Base CRM are used to gain deeper insight into sales conversions. Users can easily track a lead through every stage of the sales cycle until they convert to revenue. CRM systems help marketers understand what is working and then enhance the tools salespeople have to close more business.

With the advent of online marketing, chief marketing officers and their teams could finally link their programs to the success of the business in the form of clicks, leads and revenue. The proliferation of smartphones is impacting this, however, through an unlikely source: phone calls. When a consumer elects to engage with a business by making a phone call—the natural conversion path on a mobile device—it creates a black hole that consumes the data on which marketers have learned to depend. A full 49 percent of conversions could be missed or misattributed by not tracking calls (metric via DialogTech). Call-attribution software enables marketers to get the same level of analytics and insight on inbound phone calls as they do for online leads.

Seventy-nine percent of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than two years (metric via Regalix Research). Using a marketing automation platform, such as Act-On, HubSpot or Marketo, gives marketers more insight into the success of their email marketing and nurture campaigns. When all marketing activities flow through a marketing automation tool, it captures precisely where a lead originates and how they interact with your business—giving users the insight they need to improve marketing for what works.

Forty-two percent of marketers rate predictive intelligence tools as critical to creating a cohesive customer journey (metric via Salesforce). They give marketers more power to understand each customer’s preferences and predict behavior patterns. Sales enablement companies such as KnowledgeTree are an example of how predictive analytics help sales reps share winning content with prospects and customers at the right point in the customer lifecycle.

Sixty-six percent of marketers believe that social media marketing has worked very effectively for their business (metric via Salesforce). Consumers now spend a quarter of their online time on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, making platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite essential to marketers’ strategies. Luckily, advertising on each of these platforms continues to evolve, and that includes audience and engagement analytics. Marketers are able to understand what social media marketing is most effective at driving both online and offline conversions.

The popularity of A/B testing has risen even further in 2015. There are now three times as many Google searches for “A/B test” versus “conversion optimization” (metric via Google). Marketers use A/B testing tools such as Optimizely to understand which version of a landing page, messaging and ad copy, calls to action, email, etc., are successfully improving their conversion rates. Even the smallest A/B test can yield deep insights into the effectiveness of marketing.

Only 27 percent of marketers currently use data targeting and segmentation, even though 91 percent rate it as an effective tool in their marketing (metric via Salesforce). This is increasingly due to the growing fragmentation of data. All the technologies mentioned previously are useful tools, but they’re siloed. Tools like Tableau help marketers connect all this data, interpret the large volumes and make it even more powerful.