The Ultimate Guide to Setting Up Omnichannel Analytics Like a Pro

If you promote your product across several channels or have multiple touchpoints across your sales funnel, you're probably knee-deep in marketing data.

This data can either help you set up marketing campaigns and make the right decisions or mislead you and result in hundreds of hours of manual data processing. Omnichannel analytics is the tool that will help you use your data properly.

Fluent’s recent research shows that consumers who are reached through a greater number of channels make purchases more frequently.

‍

On the other hand, a survey from Brightpearl claims that 87% of retailers consider an omnichannel approach the key to success in their business. Yet, an astounding 74% percent of them aren’t satisfied with the outcomes of omnichannel strategies. A lack of expertise in technologies and omnichannel analytics are the main barriers to creating a successful omnichannel strategy.

So, most businesses agree with the importance of utilizing omnichannel marketing analytics, but they struggle to adjust it properly and put it into action. In this post, we’ll dig deeper into why omnichannel analytics is important and how you set up omnichannel marketing analytics from scratch.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is omnichannel analytics?

💡Omnichannel analytics uses customer data gathered across all your channels to create a holistic picture of your marketing performance, improve user experience, and optimize business processes. The idea behind omnichannel analytics is to aggregate data from fractured sources to extract useful insights about consumer behavior and find the touchpoints that drive the most sales.💡

Google’s CEE and IPSOS’s survey shows that over 80% of consumers use both online and offline sources to research a product and make a purchase.

For marketers, this means they can’t separate the digital and brick-and-mortar worlds anymore. Today, consumers travel through several touchpoints with a product before making an actual purchase.

The same survey states that users interact with around three touchpoints in the digital space or 1.7 touchpoints when researching the product offline.

‍

Without omnichannel analytics, marketers can’t say for sure which touchpoint motivates customers to buy a product.

Let’s imagine that a user searches for a toothbrush on a marketplace like Amazon.

The Superbrush brand caught the prospect’s attention, so they added the toothbrush to their wishlist. Several days later, while searching for “Top 10 toothbrushes according to dentists”, the user notices Superbrush’s paid ads and proceeds to the brand’s website to learn more about their products.

A week later, our user gets a reminder from Amazon about the toothbrush from their wishlist but doesn’t pay attention. Eventually, they purchase a Superbrush toothbrush in a local convenience store.

Is it fair to say that offline conversions are the main sales drivers for Superbrush? Of course not. If the company excludes all previous steps from the customer journey, prospects will never know about this brand and will most likely ignore their products offline.

Well, then how can you say which exact touchpoint leads to a conversion? That’s where omnichannel marketing analytics with attribution modeling comes to the rescue.

🚀Read How To Tackle B2B Marketing Attribution in 2021🚀

In a nutshell, the attribution model is the rule or set of rules that show how each touchpoint influences the customer’s decision to purchase by assigning specific values to every touchpoint.

🚀Read How to Build a Custom Marketing Attribution Model 🚀

We’ll get back to omnichannel attribution later and discover its benefits for omnichannel analytics.

Why is omnichannel analytics important?

Omnichannel marketing is a vital lead-generation strategy for all businesses. But what’s the big deal with omnichannel analytics, and why does it become the main stumbling block in a successful marketing campaign?

At its core, omnichannel marketing analytics shows you which touchpoints across the customer journey do the trick and which channels underperform.

Promoting your product across a multitude of channels requires time, proper tools, and money. It can be hurtful to see that some of your channels don’t drive customers to buy your product. But it’s even more hurtful to be blind to that.

Omnichannel analytics helps you understand which touchpoints generate leads, which of them burn a hole in your pocket, and how you can change that.

If that isn’t a good enough reason for you, let’s talk numbers!

According to Harvard Business Review, 73% of consumers use multiple channels during their shopping journey. How can marketers measure the effectiveness of each touchpoint without omnichannel analytics?

McKinsey states that 78% of consumers don’t get a consistent omnichannel brand experience. And 67% of companies blame the lack of customer analytics across channels for this. Thus, omnichannel analytics is the best possible solution to maintain brand voice and improve the user experience across channels.

As reported by Deloitte, 56% of every dollar spent in physical stores is influenced by omnichannel advertising. Why miss an opportunity to drive more sales? And how can you know which part of your sales is driven by online advertisement?

Retailers who adopt omnichannel marketing notice a 30% lifetime value increase. Why miss an opportunity to get more recurring revenue and gain loyal customers?

The list of questions goes on. But one thing that we know for sure is that omnichannel analytics gives companies a competitive edge and allows them to see the performance of their marketing efforts.

Omnichannel analytics use cases

Fancy statistics are only numbers until you know how to apply omnichannel analytics in real situations. Let’s consider industries where companies successfully apply omnichannel analytics right now.

Banking

Banks turned digital a long time ago. The omnichannel approach is a necessity in the financial industry. According to Accenture, 50% of customers interact with their banks through mobile apps at least once per week. Other means of interaction include phone calls, face-to-face interactions, desktop apps, and so on.

By merging all of these channels in a single ecosystem, banks provide a seamless cross-device experience for customers. Despite the massive digitalization of banks, there are still many points to improve. For example, McKinsey’s survey discovered that almost one in two credit card customers aren’t satisfied with the process of opening a new card.

Filling all necessary forms digitally and receiving a card in a physical branch might easily solve a problem. By the way, that’s a case that was successfully implemented by the Ukrainian digital bank Monobank. Customers can submit an application online, and the bank will send the credit card to the postal office or right to the customer’s door.

However, this approach requires complicated omnichannel analytics, KYC verification, and the elimination of data silos between all branches of the bank.

Travel and hospitality

Research has shown that 90% of travelers do their holiday research online using various channels, such as Tripadvisor, Booking, Expedia, Airbnb, and so on.

To maximize their outreach, travel and hospitality companies should maintain their brand presence across all popular review websites, hotel aggregators, travel metasearch engines, and so on. But it’s equally important to track the results of marketing efforts on these platforms with omnichannel analytics.

Here’s a great case study on how Accenture helped Carnival Corporation connect every cruise guest to a personalized experience and capture data on board to create new services.

Ecommerce and Retail

Ecommerce and retail are among the industries that gain the most benefits from omnichannel analytics. Multiple touchpoints across the customer journey and a vast number of marketing campaigns allow retailers to reach out to new target audiences and improve customer experience.

For example, let’s review the case of the Australian department store retailer Myer.

Myer is one of Australia’s leading retailers and a pioneer in omnichannel retailing. It has managed to successfully combine physical stores with online shopping platforms, such as eBay, Amazon Marketplace, and their ecommerce website to promote products to a larger number of customers.

The retailer uses omnichannel analytics to track all sales, orders, and other interactions with customers. By doing so, Myer has managed to improve sales by 74% in just one year!

🚀Read 12 Ecommerce Trends for 2022: Will the Growth Keep Slowing Down? 🚀

Gaming

The gaming industry is another field where omnichannel analytics offers a lot of benefits. Gaming companies can’t afford to lose players because that would result in an immediate loss of revenue.

Besides, such companies have to precisely track revenue coming from different sources, such as microtransactions, the distribution of physical copies, virtual copies, thematic merchandise, and more.

That’s why industry giants rely on omnichannel analytics solutions to track the effectiveness of sales and marketing efforts. For example, Ubisoft, a large video game company, uses Tecsys to deliver a unified shopping experience to players.

How to build omnichannel marketing analytics

Despite the industry-specific differences, omnichannel marketing analytics share some similar characteristics. We’ll go through the different tools and approaches that will help you build a well-performing omnichannel marketing analytics strategy.

Set up data visualization

Omnichannel marketing analytics goes hand in hand with data visualization solutions.

Data visualization provides an opportunity to easily monitor all marketing efforts across every channel, analyze what’s really happening on different platforms, and take immediate action when necessary.

🚀Read How to Use Data Visualization Tools for Your Marketing Reports 🚀

Tools such as Google Data Studio, Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau are good examples of data visualization solutions that can be used to monitor omnichannel digital marketing, sales, and other processes in your organization.

Pick ETL middleware software

Omnichannel marketing analytics is all about data. Marketing and sales data provide some companies with a competitive edge.  For others, it provides nothing but a headache.

But why is this happening?

According to Iterable, data silos and data centralization are the second-largest roadblocks on the road to a wholesome omnichannel marketing strategy. In fact, 65% of marketers experience problems with data centralization.

While some companies don’t have the required talent to build a unified data infrastructure, others lack the resources required for costly software development.

However, third-party ETL software solutions are steadily changing this situation.

ETL (extract, transform, load) is a process your data has to go through before you can analyze it. The first step is to pull the data from several sources, then transform it into a new format, and finally import it into a data warehouse. With a centralized data warehouse, your data will be immediately accessible to all employees who need it.  

Third-party solutions are more affordable than custom ones. Besides, you can integrate them with your data sources and current infrastructure in days, not months.

🚀Read A Guide to ETL Processes: ETL Stages and Benefits Explained​ 🚀

By eliminating data silos and making data more available, companies facilitate the analysis process and save time on manual data extraction and transformation operations.

ETL processes for omnichannel marketing analytics

When it comes to omnichannel marketing, it’s better to use marketing-oriented ETL systems. Let’s consider the example of Improvado.

Improvado is a revenue data platform that helps companies merge marketing and sales insights from fractured sources. With 300+ integrations onboard, this platform helps to unify data gathered from social media campaigns, organic search, paid ads, email campaigns, CRM systems, and other sources.

What’s more, marketing specialists get purified, analysis-ready insights in no time. Improvado’s Marketing Common Data Model framework, the ETL system, normalizes all marketing metrics, unifies all naming conventions, and streamlines the data to any visualization tool.

By integrating your data with BI tools, you can create actionable dashboards that provide a holistic picture of your omnichannel efforts.

🚀 Read The Best Data Visualization Tools — Top 30 BI Software 🚀

Additionally, Improvado helps users correctly attribute their leads with privacy-first analytics. Cookies are no longer a reliable source of customer identification. Improvado’s advanced cookieless attribution model helps to identify all touchpoints across each customer’s journey and measure the effectiveness of each separate channel.

Hence, if you need to aggregate your marketing and sales data, it’s better to stick to narrowly focused platforms. The market is full of ETL solutions, many of which position themselves as jacks-of-all-trades. However, they are often limited in terms of integrations and extract data from basic sources like Facebook, Google Ads, and so on.

Expand your data reach with new sources

When you have an integrated view of all data across your organization, it’s time to add new marketing sources.

The more channels you target, the more prospects you’re going to attract. Plus, potential customers will have the opportunity to learn more about your product from reviews and current customers on the various platforms.

With an ETL system and a properly configured dashboard, it won’t be a problem to track the effectiveness of your efforts across tens of channels and identify the best-performing ones.

You can seamlessly promote your product via social media, launch email campaigns, utilize demand-side platforms, develop paid ads, create engaging content, and streamline all performance data via API to your centralized data storage.

Iron out your omnichannel analytics

With all data and required tools at your fingertips, there’s one last thing you have to do: polish your marketing analytics.

It’s a continuous process that can take years and a lot of effort, so approach this step wisely. Today, companies use analytics maturity models to assess the degree of the organization’s analytics development and create a roadmap to analytics perfection.

Analytics maturity models don’t show you the exact steps that will help you achieve a new level of analytics, but rather show where you need to be. You have to pave the way to analytics perfection by yourself.

Here's an example of Improvado’s analytics maturity model.

You can find more maturity models and learn all of the steps to analytics perfection in our guide.

🚀Read Analytics Maturity Model: The Path to Analytics Perfection 🚀

Set up your omnichannel analytics with Improvado

Omnichannel marketing brings a lot of benefits to businesses. However, it requires a single source of truth to monitor the performance of your efforts across different channels and give you an accurate understanding of the ROI your marketing activities bring.

A marketing ETL system is a must-have tool for managing insights and making use of your marketing and sales data. Improvado unifies data from 500+ sources, harmonizes it, and puts it in a data warehouse. Analysts can connect analytical visualization tools to create informative dashboards that show how the company’s marketing performance is changing in real-time.

Schedule a call to learn how Improvado can accelerate your omnichannel analysis and harmonize all of the metrics that influence your revenue 👇.

‍