Analytics for Agencies: How to Get Started
- The use of analytics tools can help agencies gather insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can be used to improve marketing strategies.
- Tools such as AgencyAnalytics can help agencies get a better understanding of their data, and even create reports that are updating automatically.
Data has been a crucial component of many successful agencies. From client reporting to making decisions where to spend the marketing budget, analytics for agencies is a topic you should spend some time on.
But when it comes to looking at the data, agency owners hit a wall. Understandable, data is only useful if you know how to interpret it—and this is where data analytics comes in. There are a variety of tools that connect different data points, so you can leverage the insights to improve your ROI, win new clients, and impress existing ones.
Let’s dig into the topic of analytics for agencies and see what companies usually struggle with, and how to overcome pain points.
Why performance analytics complicated is
Those running an agency want to keep an eye on the performance of their company, especially KPIs and ROI. Understandable, after all, it’s your responsibility to not only keep the company afloat, but also scale your agency.
The problem is that it’s not easy to track data, let alone do an audit and compile everything into a report with actionable insights and next steps. So, you have to make a decision: do you hire an agency providing analytics services, or do attempt to capture the data yourself and optimize your agency?
Another pain point is that you don’t just need to track your agency’s performance, marketing agencies need to track the results of their campaigns, present them easily for their clients, and give them access to historical data. Ideally, everything would be in a dashboard that is hidden behind a login, but how do you get the data and build the reports?
Luckily, the question of data management has been solved by companies such as AgencyAnalytics that offer a tool that combines marketing data and metrics from different sources into a dashboard. Thanks to its integrations, you can connect pretty much any data source, from Google Analytics to Twitter and Shopify.
These tools do come with a certain price, but there are free alternatives such as Looker Studio. The only caveat is that GDS is rather complicated to set up, so you might need the help of analytics agencies specializing in setting up reports.
How to improve performance analytics
Having all data in one place doesn’t just benefit agency owners, it also makes it easier for your clients. Let’s imagine you’re an SEO agency serving clients who know a thing or two about search engine optimization. While they do trust your competence, they want to keep an eye on the marketing strategy and its results.
Some agencies still rely heavily on Google Sheets for their reporting. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re on a tight budget, Google sheets is a good choice. But even with Zapier automations, you’ll still need to do a lot of manual work. And let’s be honest, Google sheets aren’t presenting data in a very pretty way.
To improve your data visualization, you can simply display a clients’ data with a dedicated reporting tool. No more sending of reports, no more follow-ups to make sure they’ve been read.
Just embed them into your client portal and let your customers access them whenever they want to.
Making sense of data
Marketers love collecting data, but only a few are well versed with the art of data visualization. Let’s take the most popular example, Google Analytics. Every agency uses it, but few are truly able to understand the data they’re looking at.
Regardless if we’re talking about internal analytics for your agency, or measuring the PPC performance for a client: you need to understand the data to draw conclusions from it.
If you’re looking at the number of subscriptions month over month, and notice an unusual increase, dig deeper to find out why:
Did you sponsor a newsletter that brought in new clients?
Did a client refer you to their business partners?
Did you go viral with a post on Facebook?
Attributing the increase in subscriptions to your agency being generally successful could be the wrong conclusion.
Analytics for agencies FAQ
Why is data analytics important for businesses today?
Data analytics can help a business make sense of their current operations, find potential issues, as well as optimization opportunities. This allows them to reduce costs, know when to hire talent, and expand their business.
What are examples of marketing analytics?
A good example of marketing analytics would be to analyze if paid campaigns are successful across social networks. Are campaigns in certain networks more successful? If so, it makes sense to allocate a bigger budget to them.
What are the components of marketing analytics?
A successful marketing analytics strategy ensures that you collect accurate data, analyze it to spot trends and patterns, and act on the insights.
Summary
There’s a lot of data agency owners can (and need to) collect for their own business, as well as their clients. Interpreting the data, and displaying it, is an art in itself. Luckily, there are many tools that help you along the way.
