Digital Event Marketing – Unless your analytics is 100% correct, don’t even start talking about marketing ROI.

In theory, digital marketing is highly trackable. But that’s only when it’s done right. The truth is that many B2B event organisers, marketers, and exhibitors who use digital marketing still feel like they’re staring at those weird green codes from the matrix when they open Google Analytics.

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who uses digital marketing and doesn’t have at least some form of analytics in place. However, considering that 14.5% of B2B event organisers don’t even know how much they’re spending on digital – and there are probably many more who only have a vague idea of what their budgets are doing – it’s clear that while everyone is using marketing analytics, few B2B event marketers are actually doing it right.

Marketing analytics is much more than some numbers in a monthly report

Portent says: “Analytics is not reporting. It’s not a static thing. It’s an activity. It should point out next actions.”

You’ve never had more platform options for building your digital marketing stack, and those platforms are more powerful (and more complicated) than ever too. All of these platforms are fighting for your budget, leaving you with disparate data, and it’s not exactly obvious what your unifying source of data should even be.

Simply investing in platforms and infrastructure isn’t enough to meet your goals

For B2B event marketers, returning visitors and event growth are most important. If your marketing analytics aren’t perfectly aligned with meeting those goals, then they’re not working. If you just see a bunch of numbers that don’t follow your train of thought, then optimising your strategy will be difficult or impossible.

How can you be sure that the numbers in your report are the right numbers? There’s far too much information available to show you all of it in a report, so it’s necessarily going to be cut down to the “essentials”.

Your marketing analytics issues can be summed up into three categories of interrelated problems:

With marketing analytics, it’s imperative that plenty of communication happens between the people tracking the metrics and the people running the business. There needs to be a concrete understanding of the business goals between both parties; the analytics team needs know enough about infrastructure and business processes to tailor their reports to suit actual business goals.

Everyone needs to be fully aware of what you are measuring and why.

• Bounce rate: This metric is often thought of as only a negative. However, users shouldn’t have to spend too long trying to, for example, sign up for your event. A moderate bounce rate can be an indication that your users are finding what they want quickly and efficiently, and then leaving after they are successful.

• Exit rate: Similar to bounce rate, this metric can actually be a positive indication if other factors are working correctly. In fact, this is a great way to see if your interested prospects (who are willing to sink a lot of effort into getting what you’re offering) are having a good experience.We see this far too often with sign up pages for trade shows: because many of the prospects are already aware of the event and are very interested in signing up, they will tolerate insufferably long and poorly designed sign up pages. This means that for these users, your exit rate will be low, and this is a bad thing! When prospects who are less acquainted with your brand try to sign up, they could easily give up, but because this is an average number, it won’t really show up in the data.

• Average time spent on page: At first glance, you might think that prospects spending a long time on your pages is a good thing. For the same reasons as above, that’s not always true. This metric has an additional confounding factor though: Google Analytics has no way of knowing if a user has additional tabs open, so they could have just left your page open and moved on to browsing another tab!

Be very careful not to base your goal tracking on any of these metrics alone.

Marketing analytics are your ultimate tool for understanding how your business is performing in the modern world. It can tell you what’s working, and more importantly, what isn’t. But analytics are just statistics, and you’ve heard the line about those and damned lies. You need to make sure that your reports are telling you the real story, and not just the story you want to hear.

Do want to know for sure that your marketing analytics are telling you the truth? We Market Events has been helping B2B event marketers to make sense of their data for years, and we’d like you to be next.

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