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In the 20th century, marketers relied on coupons, customer feedback, and mainstream media subscription numbers to understand their reach and impact. Figuring out what worked and what didn't was a guessing game at best.
But in the digital world, there is a wealth of numbers for marketers to analyze and interpret their audience and customer behavior. Nevertheless, marketing analytics remains a challenging discipline.
To help you realize you're not alone in your analytics woes, we asked the experts at Content Marketing World what they think is the biggest challenge in marketing analytics. Thankfully, they shared their concerns with us and gave us advice on how to overcome the hurdles.
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Clinging to the old belief that you can capture every behavior and every characteristic of a person leads to despair. This level of detail is disappearing and – with modern models and methods – is no longer proving to be cost-effective. — Jim SternePresident, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara
Having too much and too little
One of the biggest challenges in marketing analytics today is the overwhelming amount of data available and the complexity of integrating data from multiple sources. With the proliferation of digital channels, social media, and various marketing tools, companies often struggle to consolidate and understand the massive amounts of data generated. Companies need to invest in data analysts who are part of the marketing organization to seamlessly integrate data from different sources. — Royna SharifiSenior Marketing Campaign Manager, Amazon Web Services
Treat it like a scientific walk in the woods
Overkill. Sometimes it is more important to see the forest for the trees than to just analyze the trees. — Michael BonfilsGlobal Managing Director, Digital International Group
Lack of integration of analyses
A major challenge with marketing analytics is the “overwhelm factor.” Most of us manage multiple technology platforms. While we can aggregate insights from multiple platforms into one dashboard set, it takes skill and effort to configure and maintain it. It's worth it, but it's not easy. Get professional help or you risk putting off the work to your own detriment. — Bernie BorgesVice President, Global Content Marketing, iQor
Missing dashboards
We see that many companies either don't measure or don't measure the right things. For us as a company, it's important to set up a report or dashboard for each client. This way, we always focus on the right KPIs (which were set when setting the goals). We report not only at the end of a campaign, but also during its execution. This allows us to constantly make adjustments and optimize. — Pauline Lannoo, Head of Digital Strategy, The Fat Lady
Botched business goals
The biggest problem is failing to link goal to measurement. Marketers often rely on superficial or irrelevant metrics as indicators of success, even though they don't necessarily indicate that a goal has been achieved.
If you just want to increase traffic or brand awareness, pageviews might be a good metric. If you want to sell more products or services, pageviews only matter if they lead to conversions. Align your key performance indicators (KPIs) with your goals and key results (OKRs). — Brian PiperDirector of Content Strategy and Evaluation, University of Rochester
Interpreting by many
Lack of a consistent reporting language. Companies collect and have access to more data than ever before, but this data is often siloed across different tools.
Because of this, data can mean different things to different people. What defines a visit in one tool may not be the same in another. Additionally, organizations often try to combine anonymous and known data, which can be nuanced. It's important to define a consistent reporting language to get the most out of your marketing analytics. — Jill RobersonSenior Vice President, Digital Marketing, Velir
Providing “fuzzy” AI assessments
There are few tools that allow you to monitor whether your content is being presented by AI, so marketers have little to no insight. I know of two ways to get a sense of how AI is interacting with your content.
One of them is in GA4, where you can track AI bots. Create an exploration with “Page Reference” as the dimension and “Sessions” as the metric. Then apply this filter: ^https://(www.meta.ai|www.perplexity.ai|chat.openai.com|claude.ai|chat.mistral.ai|gemini.google.com|bard.google.com|chatgpt.com|copilot.microsoft.com)(/.*)?$
The other way is through Semrush's Keyword Position Report for tracked key phrases or the SERP Features section in a domain overview.
All of these assessments are vague at best, but provide directionality when your informational content is seeing fewer clicks. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the need to monetize AI will lead to much more direct AI insights and tools for brands and partners. — Haley CollinsOperations Manager, GPO
Make the quick and easy decision
Marketers often have numerous systems tracking different metrics and no way to integrate and normalize that data. This means we rely too heavily on the tool we think will most easily get the data people are asking for most often, rather than using the data to make better content marketing decisions overall.
For example, even though GA3 hasn't been collecting data for over a year, many marketers still haven't defined their goals or optimized their GA4 reports. I even know of one team that hasn't activated G4 yet.
I can hardly imagine not gaining insights from web analytics for a whole year. — Erika HealdFounder and Chief Content Officer, Erika Heald Marketing Consulting
Minimize GA4 performance
Get what you need out of GA4. There are two approaches here: let team members invest time and energy to learn it, or outsource the work to an agency or consultant. — Dennis ShiaoFounder, Attention Retention
Pay the price
Cost is a major challenge. These tools are out of reach for many smaller businesses and independent content marketers, and that needs to change. — Beth ElderkinContent Marketing Manager, Informa Connect
Lack of accountability
Definitely attribution. This means we are taking more of the full cycle from external agencies and building up internal expertise and capabilities over time, especially in the area of basic tracking. — Tony ByrneFounder, Real Story Group
Belief in unicorns
The biggest challenge by far, in my opinion, is holistic attribution. The unicorn of multi-touch has not yet been truly realized, and a lot of marketing can produce results that are never attributed – without that attribution, funding becomes questionable. — Jenn VandeZandeEditor-in-Chief, SAP CX + Industries
Only have one key to the safe
Many marketing analytics are managed by an individual or team. Share this data with everyone so they can monitor and keep an eye on their content's performance. This will allow companies to use this information in a more data-driven and proactive way. — Zack KadishSenior SEO Strategy Director, Conductor
Lack of cooperation between marketing and sales
There is a disconnect between top of the funnel (marketing) metrics and bottom of the funnel (sales) metrics. The whole point is to seamlessly move prospects from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel to ultimately drive conversions and maximize sales potential. — Pam DidnerVice President of Marketing, Relentless Pursuit LLC
Remaining skills and time
The biggest challenge with analytics is not devoting resources and time to keeping your systems up to date. It's important to hire an analyst or expert to handle ongoing maintenance and updates to keep your systems in step with your evolving marketing campaigns and strategies.
Only by keeping the analyst informed of developments so that he can update your systems accordingly can you correctly and reliably report on the actual results. Otherwise, you risk getting an inaccurate or incomplete picture of what is actually happening. — Monica NortonVice President of Communications and Content, Nextiva
Ignoring inclusivity
Transitioning from third-party data to first-party data and quantifying data points in a coherent, fair way is what many will need to tackle now and even more so in the years to come. How can we define an ideal customer profile (ICP) accurately (and fairly) and without bias, coming from trusted sources that give us a good overall picture? Many brands have not done the groundwork for this shift as privacy changes and collecting accurate data becomes even more important.
Put together a process that incorporates DEIBA (diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and accountability) best practices, or work with trained professionals who can help integrate these practices into the collection, maintenance, and issuance process. — Troy SandidgeFounder, Strategy Hackers
Getting the most out of important analytics
Phew, that's a lot of marketing analytics challenges. How many of them apply to your situation? Fortunately, awareness is the first step to overcoming these challenges. Now that you know you're not in a unique situation, make a plan today to implement one piece of advice to solve the problem.
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
