What is the Difference Between Metrics and Analytics in Marketing?

What Is the Difference Between Metrics and Analytics in Marketing?

It’s impossible to talk about marketing without stressing the importance of both metrics and marketing analytics. They are both critical to most marketing roles and allow marketers to make informed decisions about their activities, communications with customers, and resource allocations. That’s why it’s so important to understand the difference between metrics and analytics in marketing.  

The distinction between metrics vs analytics is actually quite simple to conceptualize. Although it’s common to see these terms used interchangeably, they’re actually different. Marketing metrics are the numbers marketers track with regard to their daily and campaign-related activities. Marketing analytics is the information a marketer can extract from the metrics. 

Marketers can track any number of marketing metrics, including the following:  

• Customer engagement
• Brand awareness
• Marketing qualified leads
• Conversions
• Lifetime customer value
• Return on investment 

It’s important to remember that in order to be useful, marketing metrics must be high quality, cover time periods with no gaps, and not be riddled with errors. Marketing metrics must be current in order to give a marketer the correct information to analyze. Ideally, marketing metrics will also give marketers a sense of change or growth over time, so they should be tracked as far back as possible. 

Marketing analytics involves analyzing the marketing metrics in order to make decisions about future marketing activity. Marketing analytics will allow marketers to compare sets of data against each other, or compare metrics month over month or year over year, giving marketers a better understanding of their current position.  

Some marketing analytics tools can instantly give you a picture that will help you make better sense of the marketing metrics you are tracking. Marketers should have basic analytical skills that allow them to determine what those metrics mean for marketing activities and how they could be adjusted for greater success in the future.