Why does Your Business Need End-To-End Analytics

What is the current state of your marketing? Which channels bring in new customers? Which ones should be abandoned? Is your investment in marketing paying off?

End-to-end analytics will answer these questions. It collects and integrates customer journey data from all channels into a single window. Incompetent picture of marketing leads to blind decision-making, which in its turn sometimes leads to loss of budget because of incorrect investments. End-to-end analytics makes marketing manageable and completely transparent and saves the budget. You always know that you are investing in effective channels and the right actions.

This article will look at end-to-end analytics. You will learn how it works and why you should choose it for your business.

What is end-to-end analytics

End-to-end analytics is a method of collecting data about a customer journey through the sales funnel to analyze marketing investments and performance.

This marketing analytics tracks user activity from the first engagement with the company’s resources to purchase and beyond to accurately calculate LTV, ROMI and other marketing metrics. End-to-end analytics provides you with information about the performance of each marketing channel so you can get an overall picture of your marketing — data is accumulated in a window on a dashboard or in a table. This ensures data-driven decision-making: which channels to abandon and which ones to promote. End-to-end analytics is suited for businesses with two or more traffic channels.

Businesses choose between two options: unified end-to-end analytics services or manual data collection from several platforms. End-to-end analytics is a set of tools and means that integrate with each other partially or fully automatically.

Why does your business need end-to-end analytics

Tracking a customer journey

End-to-end analytics collects information about the sales funnel and first purchase and highlights all bottlenecks in working with the customer. Then marketing responds and adjusts the advertising strategy, and executives, in their turn, adjust the work of managers who move leads down the sales funnel. End-to-end analytics also provides information on where the customer has found out about your company.

Example. The purchaser states in the survey that they simply found your product on the Internet and had never heard of the company before. However, analytics shows that the user went to your website from Facebook ads, so their purchase resulted from advertising on the social network. Without analytics, the conclusion about the effectiveness would be wrong.

Budget optimization

"All investments will pay off" could be the slogan of end-to-end analytics. This method shows all weak spots of your marketing:

• ineffective advertising campaigns;
• customer acquisition channels that do not pay off;
• remuneration of managers who do not earn money for the company — lose customers, do not close deals.

On the other hand, end-to-end analytics will show strong points.

Example. Website analytics shows that 50% of customers find out about your company because of your content — they find articles with SEO optimization in search engines and go to the company's website. End-to-end analytics also shows that the company invests more money in advertising and it brings in only 10% of new customers. Conclusion: content is the strong suit of the company's marketing, so it may be worth investing more in this area, rather than increasing the number of advertising campaigns.

Real-time analytics

End-to-end analytics services receive data automatically in real time. You can see all the information about your marketing in a single window. It is like an airplane instrument panel. If one indicator is out of the norm, you react and look for the reason.

Marketing transparency

Business owners will always ask what the company's money is spent on. Marketing is no exception. End-to-end analytics captures the entire customer journey and the actions taken to engage them, provides information for calculating the cost of attracting and retaining a customer.

Tracking the status of work with the customer

When the transaction cycle is long, it is more difficult to track investments in attracting customers and working with them. End-to-end analytics monitors the work of marketing and managers. It also shows the prospects of working with this or that customer.

Let's say that some office supplies company (B2B) usually closes deals in a month. A customer saw your ad in Yandex.Direct and contacted your company asking for a large order. The manager is in charge of the deal, but its closing is delayed because the customer is trying to get other terms. At a certain point, payment for the work of the manager exceeds the amount of money from a possible transaction. Let's also calculate the cost of advertising that brought in the customer. Here, we come to the conclusion that it is unprofitable to continue working with them, the order will not pay off the investment. With end-to-end analytics, the company will be aware of all disadvantages of the situation and redirect the manager to other transactions.

Accuracy of metrics

Analytics that does not collect all the data will not be 100% reliable. End-to-end analytics allows you to receive more correct data and make more correct conclusions.

Tools for end-to-end analytics

End-to-end analytics collects data from different channels and services: Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrics, CRM, call tracking software apps and others. Each one tracks several metrics but does not show the complete picture of your marketing.

For example, Google Analytics will determine the number of transactions and the amount of money but will not calculate the total ROMI because it does not correlate sales with costs.

End-to-end analytics will compensate for this and link campaign data to sales and investments.

How does end-to-end analytics collect data

• Manually (in Excel and Google Sheets). This option is free but it takes a long time, and there is a risk of errors and data loss. End-to-end analytics needs additional configuration for partial automation. This process requires time, new skills and paid services for integration.
• Another option is connected to end-to-end analytics services — special tools that facilitate work and show data visually on dashboards.

Our Altcraft Platform collects customer data from online and offline sources in a single window: demographic, behavioral, transactional, etc. It supports integrations with LPgenerator, Tilda, SMS gateways, Yandex AppMetrica via HTTP API and WebHooks. It accelerates and facilitates the process of obtaining information for analysis and decision-making.

How does end-to-end analytics work

Step 1. Preparing for data collection

End-to-end analytics collects data through:

• Information on offline campaigns. Data on promo codes in brochures, statistics on phone numbers in advertising banners. The company can assign each campaign a unique number to know exactly which campaign the customer came from.
• Cookies are data about user activity on the website. Cookies provide you with information about clicks, location, product views. This data is collected by scripts — code elements for simple actions. For example, they remember Client ID — anonymized identifiers that are assigned to each website visitor. These identifiers get into the analytics system.
• Registration data on the website: email addresses, phone numbers and others. When users log in, they receive User ID — a specific identifier that gets into the company's CRM.
• Use UTM tags to count clicks on links. UTM tags also provide you with details about the type of ad and different traffic sources.

What are UTM tags

UTM tags are snippets of text added to ads or other messages from the company: SMS, articles, email newsletters, QR codes. The tags determine all the details of the traffic source: which ad or banner the customer came from.

Example. A bank advertises a new service and mentions it in a magazine article. How to find out how many people will follow the link from the article and register in the service? The answer is simple — add a UTM tag.

A “tail" containing markers of the advertising campaign appears at the end of a regular link:

To add the tag to the link, use "/?". To separate parameters of the tag, use the "&" symbol.

UTM tag elements:

This is what a link with a UTM tag looks like:

Sometimes a link with tags is supplemented with other (optional) parameters:

• utm_term — for Google Ads and Yandex.Direct campaigns, it is used to determine the keyword the customer came from. Parameters can be dynamic and static. The former indicate keywords that users click on, the latter have specific keywords. They also track the region and other identifiers.

Examples:

utm_term=car-rental-NYC is a static parameter.
utm_term={keyword} is a dynamic parameter. 

• utm_content is used to distinguish between similar offers. For example, ads differ only in banners. The tag will show which one was reacted to more often.

Examples of parameters: link, landing, redbanner.

How to create a UTM tag

• Manually — type in all parameters yourself.
• Use UTM link builders — UTM.io, UTM Builder, etc.

The link with a tag is long and looks unappealing in the ad. URL shortener services will solve the problem, for instance: Bitly or Goo.

How does it work

Let's take some URL with UTM tags and place the link in a shortener service.

Now the link looks like this:

NB Services add their name to the link but in some of them it is possible to preserve the domain name of the company's website (usually a paid function). Also, sometimes social networks and email services do not accept shortened links and mark such messages as spam.

Step 2. Data collection and decision-making

End-to-end-analytics service:

• Collects tagged data from analytics systems, CRM, call tracking software apps, etc.
• Links sales data to investments to determine ROMI and other metrics that the business tracks.
• Shows general data for decision-making in a single window.

Conclusion

End-to-end analytics is a method for collecting and analyzing data from different marketing channels. It shows the entire customer journey and cost of attraction and retention in a single window, so the business knows whether the investment will pay off. End-to-end analytics determines ROMI and calculates LTV. It also ensures real-time data, transparent marketing, budget optimization and understanding of managers' contribution to working with customers.

Information for end-to-end analytics is obtained from analytics services, call tracking software apps, CRM and other systems. UTM tags are used for identification — link markers, cookies, registration data on the website, promo codes and phone numbers if campaigns are offline.

For end-to-end analytics, companies choose manual or partially automated (Google Sheets, Excel tables) tools or special services: ready-made or custom, which collect data from other sources automatically.