Marketing and sales professionals can use data to create more effective strategies for their teams. This blog post will provide an introduction to the process of analyzing marketing and sales analytics.
Do you want to know how analytics reporting can help your marketing and sales efforts?
In this blog post, we will explore reporting so that you can understand the difference.
We'll also give a brief overview of the benefits of analytics reporting as well as provide some tips on where to find it. The first step is understanding what analytics means for your business.
Analytics reports are used by marketers and sales professionals to optimize their performance in various areas such as conversion rates, customer lifetime value, revenue per visitor, etc.
These metrics enable them to identify trends that may be contributing or hindering their success in these areas which they can then take action on accordingly.
Reporting can be done in many ways. One example is the analytics reporting app which can provide you with a range of analytics reports that are specific to your business needs.
The benefits of reporting lie in its ability to help marketers and sales professionals identify areas for improvement, gain insights into their marketing investment, improve customer relationships or increase revenue-generating opportunities.
There are many analytics reporting tools out there to help you get started. Here is an example of analytics reports:
- Analytics Report (Search)
- Mobile App Activity - Overview
- Email Open Rates for Marketing Campaigns by Day or Timeframe
You can also find analytics reporting on the internet with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or analytics.
With reporting you can get a snapshot of how your customers engage with your business, learn from their behavior and create more value for them.
Reporting vs. Analytics: What's the Difference?
A necessary distinction between two types of business intelligence that are both valuable and quite different.
"Reporting" and "analytics" are two phrases used interchangeably in a lot of business material these days to denote the general application and use of data – to track the continuous health of the organisation and to inform decision making.
"Analytics," in my opinion, is a more advanced term that indicates using more brains and gaining more understanding.
Perhaps this is why so many people in the industry have started using term to refer to or describe plain old (but still vital!) reporting.
The truth is that each word refers to two distinct functions that add various levels of value to your company.
And by conflating the words, you'll lose sight of the critical distinction between measuring and investigating your performance.
Definitions
"The process of compiling data into informational summaries in order to monitor how different areas of an organisation are performing," according to the definition of reporting.
This area includes measuring core metrics and delivering them – whether in an email, a slidedeck, or an online dashboard.
"The process of exploring data and reports in order to extract significant insights that can be used to better understand and enhance business performance," according to the definition of analytics.
What is the definition of reporting?
Consider two aspects of the definition of reporting: what a report is and what reporting does. "A written or spoken explanation of a condition, occurrence, etc." is how a report is defined.
Now let's apply this definition to your marketing or sales operations. Reporting is defined as the process of accumulating and organising data into visual, written, or spoken summaries in this context.
What is the purpose of this?
In a nutshell, reports tell you what's going on and assist you in converting the raw data your company collects into a comprehensible manner.
Have you received the expected amount of traffic for your campaign?
Was your team able to close as many deals this quarter as they did last?
Reporting allows you to keep track of how well your team's initiatives are functioning overall.
A number of internet tools can assist you in developing reports that are easily available to your staff.
If you use HubSpot, reporting features like dashboards visually represent your data, making it easier to explain and understand for your team.
Other online tools, such as Google Analytics and Kissmetrics, can help you zoom in on key data points and watch how your online audience interacts with your site as they navigate it.
What are analytics, exactly?
The term "analytics" refers to the process of analysing data. This definition may seem self-evident, yet analysis is the "in-depth examination of anything complex in order to comprehend its nature or discover its key traits."
What is the essential difference between this and reporting?
Unlike reporting, which focuses on accumulating data you've collected, analytics focuses on studying and evaluating data or reports to gain important insight into why certain trends occurred.
For both procedures to work, data must be collected. The analysis section, on the other hand, provides a better insight of your visitors', leads', or customers' behaviour. After you've figured out why they acted the way they did, you may work on improving your content or method.
So, why is it important to understand the difference between reporting and analytics?
Understanding what each of these processes does, at a high level, ensures that you are maximising the potential of both while avoiding losing out on crucial characteristics of either.
You'll need the most complete picture available to make data-driven judgments about the path you'll take. This necessitates as much knowledge as possible of the what, how, and why questions raised by your data.
By incorporating both reporting and analytics capabilities into your team's daily routines, you'll be able to create a key framework that not only answers these questions, but also uses the data to help you improve your operations in the future.
Value distinctions
Reporting gives you data, while analytics provide you insight. Reporting creates questions, analytics seeks to answer them.
Both are useful, but for different reasons.
What makes analytics so unique?
Analytics clarifies the "why?" and "so what?" questions.
How?
Because it's dynamic — and not just on a time or interval scale. You should be able to bend the data to your specifications. If all you see is a list of standard measures, it's not a true analytic evaluation (or an analytics product).
You can generate real-life recommendations regarding your business from this dynamic study of the data. What should you do differently in your daily routine to boost your key performance indicators?
In this regard, analytics is unique in that it is highly actionable. It must, in reality, be addressed. Only your own follow-up, only your own creation and execution of recommended next steps, can truly offer the benefit of analytics. There's more on that later.
What is the visual representation of each?
As an example, consider Monthly Recurring Revenue.
MRR is commonly reported in the following format. The MRR for the previous year is shown in this graph, which is updated monthly.
You can tinker with the parameters and delve into different nooks and crannies of the data to examine your MRR.
MRR segmented by marketing channel during the same twelve-month period as above.
You can also get much more specific.
MRR for four sales reps, limited to the last 90 days and indicated weekly is shown below. This would be useful not just for day-to-day management but also for quarterly performance reviews.
Analytical techniques vary.
Ad-hoc sessions or recurring deep-dives can both be used for analytics.
Analysis of cohorts
Cohort analysis is a widespread and normal activity that frequently finds its way into reporting.
While it's useful with any statistic, it's especially important in a churn analysis because it tells when a client is most likely to cancel during the customer lifetime. These insights can be used by customer success teams to work proactively and prevent churn.
Segmentation
Segmentation is the process of splicing your data and separating groups depending on certain characteristics.
You can, for example, separate your client data by industry vertical to understand how consumer behaviour varies depending on the type of organisation.
You can also separate your revenue data by region to see which parts of the world are the most profitable and offer the most opportunities for your company.
On the one hand, segmentation is a pretty basic idea — and on the other, it is extremely difficult. That's because there's so much you can do with it.
Check out one of our feature updates where we try to describe all the different ways you may slice and dice your data as an illustration of how dynamic and versatile segmentation can be.
The post-analytics follow-up
Investing time, resources, and staff in analytics is only worthwhile if you follow through.
The actual meat of analytics is in applying what you've learned to practical and tactical aspects of your company. The value add is improving best practises so that metrics improve.
A quick synopsis of the follow-up procedure is as follows:
Assemble the analysis' findings, as well as possible interpretations for them.
Key players should be informed of the findings. Employees at any level can be affected. Transparency is the greatest policy when it comes to numbers and performance.
It promotes a better knowledge of the metrics and one's effect, as well as buy-in and enthusiasm for new goals and techniques, laying the groundwork for a data-driven culture.
Determine your objectives and the techniques or approaches you'll try.
Make a time to verify the findings. Is it really two weeks? How about 30 days? Allow plenty of time for the findings to show. Allowing your drive to go quickly to obstruct your ability to learn from what you're doing is a mistake.
Perform the same analysis to see if the adjustments resulted in the desired outcomes.
For each team, below are some examples of reporting and analytics: Marketing Reporting Metrics:
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
LTV:CAC Analytics:
# of qualified leads Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
LTV:CAC Analytics:
What is our MRR for each lead source?
How much of our new business MRR can be attributable to the Adwords ad we ran last month?
Which marketing channels have the lowest return on investment (ROI)? (At ChartMogul, we discussed how to use churn rate to assess the success of marketing channels.)
Sales
Reporting metrics:
Analytics:
Customer Success
Reporting metrics:
Analytics:
Finance
Reporting metrics:
Analytics:
In the end, both reporting and analytics are critical, and both are quite helpful.
They are not, however, the same thing.
In the tech sector, buzzwords emerge frequently, and suddenly everyone is using word 'X' to describe thing 'Y.' Words take on different meanings depending on how they're branded.
That, I believe, is what "reporting" and "analytics" threaten. Great analytic efforts are conflated with reporting, and typical KPI presentations are marketed as analytics.
Losing vigilance with language loses us clarity in any situation. When we mix together phrases like this in business, we lose sight of the function we're truly doing (or paying for).
As a result, we may overlook the potential that the function reveals.
If this seems like a dramatic view on the situation, it's because ChartMogul's entire objective is around assisting our customers in growing their subscription businesses.
We offer a reporting and analytics platform, and we want our users to feel empowered as well as informed.
Everyone understands the need of KPI reporting, but demonstrating the benefits of analytics may be tough — much more so if someone has a distorted or diluted understanding of what "analytics" is.
So, I hope this clarification was useful! Please go forth, seize your data, and engage in both reporting and analytics to help your team and business flourish.
