Digital Marketing Benchmarks Leveraged by Marketing Analytics Tools

The aim of this paper is to provide a structured overview of several useful marketing analytics tools and guidance in creation of company’s own digital marketing dashboard and benchmarks. These tools display in a clear and creative manner the trends and dynamics of the numbers (budgets, costs, investment), the percentages (shares, ratios), as well as various statistical data, rankings and KPIs. By exploiting the data from marketing analytics tools, the entire business of a company can be leveraged. Ideally, the data should be regularly monitored and benchmarked to relevant criteria and business results of the industry leaders. If some benchmarks are not available within a marketing analytics tool, a company can develop own benchmarking system and scales based on own database. Then it would be able to personalize such dashboards to great extent – to reflect own product assortment, lines of business, digital capabilities of own B2B partners, and allow scores comparison through markets and through time (MoM / YoY trends and dynamics). By combining external and internal analytics tools, a company can achieve insights of greater value in relation to its core-business, products / services and its digital marketing strategy. This paper covers detailed review of digital marketing metrics within the selected tools, by also mentioning the major advantages and disadvantages of each tool. The paper also discusses development of internal digital marketing standards, ranking scales and benchmarking criteria which can support decision-making in digital marketing practice, and it also addresses the probable direction of future development of marketing analytics tools in general.