The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies

Chapter 10

Analytics

Most of this book has been about data collected from a wide variety of industries, but ultimately the best data you can use to direct your marketing efforts will be your own. Your audience may be different from the average. This is where analytics comes in. This is where you’ll need to start doing your own science.

This chapter will start with four pieces of data I gathered from a survey I conducted with marketers. I wanted to gain a qualitative understanding of how marketers are using analytics data. You should use these graphs as a way to benchmark your current performance. Are you ahead of the curve or behind?

After that, I’ll introduce you to the scientific method as it can be applied to your own website and marketing efforts. You’ll learn four continual steps you should be doing to become a scientifically driven marketer.

The first question I asked in my survey to marketers about analytics was, “Do you pay for analytics?” I’m personally of the opinion that there are great tools both paid (the company I work for, HubSpot, comes to mind) and free (Google Analytics is the market leader in free analytics systems) that marketers can use to get insights into their metrics. This survey, as with most that I do, was designed to build a qualitative picture of the problem I’m attempting to solve.

I found that a full 76 percent of the hundreds of marketers who answered my survey reported that they do not pay for analytics software (Figure 10.1). This is not to say ...