There are many tools for promoting business in the modern world: from targeted online advertising, blogs and social networks to offline billboards and TV commercials. Companies often spend hundreds of thousands of rubles a month on this.
End-to-end analytics is a system that helps determine which channel customers came from. It tracks a person’s path from the first contact with an ad to a purchase and allows you to choose the most effective promotion methods. In this article, we will look at what other business tasks end-to-end analytics solves. We will tell you how to implement and configure it.
What is end-to-end analytics?
End-to-end analytics is a data collection system that accumulates information about all customer interactions with your company. This includes ad views, website or office visits, calls to the call center, all applications and purchases.
The main goal of end-to-end analytics is to provide the company with information for decision-making. For example, this could be a decision on which promotion channels to choose or which creatives are the most successful. Ultimately, such a conscious choice increases the effectiveness of investments in marketing.
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An end-to-end analytics system does not necessarily have to be complex. It can be implemented as an Excel table with “manual” data entry. Or as special software that automatically “pulls” information from various sources and prepares visual reports.
The format for implementing end-to-end analytics depends only on the capabilities and goals of a specific business.
Example of end-to-end analytics
Let’s say you launched contextual advertising in Yandex and placed a billboard near the metro. You used different phone numbers for different channels. The budgets were the same.
A week later, they decided to collect statistics: the number of impressions and clicks on the online ad, as well as the number of requests from the site, were looked up in Yandex.Metrica. Sales from requests from the Internet were found in CRM. There, they also took data on calls, requests, and sales from the billboard. Then they put everything together in one Excel table and analyzed it.
It turned out that 10 clients came from the Internet and each made a purchase for 1,000 rubles. And only 5 people contacted from the billboard, their average check was 500 rubles. Given equal budgets, online advertising that leads to the site turned out to be four times more effective. After all, in the first case, the company earned 10,000 rubles, in the second – it was able to get only 2,500 rubles.
Of course, this is a simplified model, but it shows the principle of combining data in a “single window” and the basics of their analysis.
What metrics are used in end-to-end analytics
The main indicator that is assessed first during analysis is ROMI or Return On Marketing Investments. It is translated as “return on marketing investments” and shows whether your investments in advertising are paying off.
The ROMI index is calculated as the ratio of advertising profit to advertising costs. It can be estimated separately for each promotion channel. ROMI can be greater than 100%. The higher it is, the more effective the channel. If the indicator is negative, it means that advertising brings losses, not profits.
How end-to-end analytics differs from web analytics
Firstly, web analytics systems provide information on the effectiveness of online promotion channels only. End-to-end analytics covers all channels: both online and offline.
Secondly, web analytics often only considers part of the sales funnel. For example, there are ad views, ad clicks, and product requests from the site, but there is no information about purchases made offline. Web analytics systems also cannot track returns or purchase refusals.
Sometimes it happens that according to data from one web system, an advertising channel works effectively, but when connecting end-to-end analytics, it turns out that the situation is slightly different.
Why do we need end-to-end analytics?
John Wanamaker, an American businessman and the founder of modern advertising, once said:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half it is.
End-to-end analytics helps answer the question of which marketing investments pay off and which don’t. In addition, it solves a number of other important tasks:
- Makes processes transparent. Provides an understanding of where customers come from and how the company works with them.
- Allows you to adjust your strategy. With the help of end-to-end analytics, you can find weak points in your business and fix them.
- Helps test new ideas. For example, conduct A/B tests for new advertising tools.
- Allows you to segment your audience. For example, you can look into cohorts in more detail and identify groups of clients who left a request but did not reach the deal. You can offer such people special conditions and further encourage them to buy.
- Automates reporting. End-to-end analytics systems have dashboards and graphs that clearly present the results of work. A full report can be generated in a couple of clicks.
- Facilitates forecasting. Accumulated data allows planning the results of using certain tools.
Who needs end-to-end analytics?
End-to-end analytics will be useful:
- company managers and business owners;
- marketers and advertising specialists;
- to the sales department staff.
It makes sense to implement it if the company uses several advertising sources, and the budget for them exceeds at least 50 thousand rubles per month. End-to-end analytics is especially necessary for businesses in times of high uncertainty to make the right decisions. For example, when launching a new project, product or website.
The type of data that an end-to-end analytics service will collect is determined by the size of the company:
- Micro businesses typically collect basic advertising and sales reports, such as promotion costs, number of applications and purchases, and revenue from each channel.
- Small and medium businesses often integrate warehouse and delivery service databases into end-to-end analytics.
- Large businesses can also automate communication chains, loyalty programs, detailed study of customer data, and so on.
Types of end-to-end analytics
End-to-end analytics systems differ in complexity and level of automation. Let’s look at the main ones.
Manual data collection
You can collect data from different channels manually. For example, download information from web analytics and CRM cabinets, and then combine it into a single Excel file or Google Sheet.
On the one hand, this method is easy to implement. On the other hand, creating a file will require a significant investment of your time. If there whatsApp material is a lot of data, then it will take a long time to compare and analyze it. For example, you will need to manually compare applications from the Internet and offline sales by the full name and phone number of clients. Reports with conclusions, graphs and diagrams will also have to be made independently.
Semi-automated end-to-end analytics
Contextual advertising platforms such as Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics allow you to add information from CRM and some other sources to reports. Data can be loaded manually: using a file in a special CSV format. The second option is to use data transfer via API.
This is a free tool, but it has a number of important disadvantages:
- To integrate CRM, you will need to contact the developers.
- Not all advertising channels can be added to the report, as the service has certain technical limitations.
Professional end-to-end analytics
Professional solutions include specialized end-to-end analytics services. Here are the most popular of them:
- Roistat;
- CallTouch;
- Mango Office;
- PrimeGate.
They fully automate the transfer of data from different channels and at the same time have a relatively simple interface. These ready-made boxed services allow you to easily create the necessary reports in a few clicks of the mouse: just select the necessary parameters and period. For example, you can see from which advertisement and which pages of the site customers visited, what payments they made.
How end-to-end analytics works
The main difficulty of end-to-end analytics is that you ng number need to come up with a way to correlate data from several sources and at different stages of work. For example, how to determine that a client who watched an ad on TV, then called the store, and later went to the site and made a purchase is the same user.
The following tools are used for this purpose:
- Call tracking is a service that tracks calls from advertising, records and analyzes them. It does this thanks to a system of additional numbers: different phone numbers are placed in advertisements. Call tracking can be static and dynamic. In the first case, the number is assigned to the channel, in the second – to the user.
- UTM tags are a way of formatting links that allows you to determine which resource the user came from.
- A cookie is a user identifier that allows the system to “recognize” the user when they visit the site again.
Multi-channel analytics
If a business conducts a large-scale advertising campaign and uses many promotion channels, then each of them influences the purchase decision. In this case, different advertising formats reinforce each other and create the so-called synergistic effect.
