What is marketing analytics?

---

Marketing analytics refers to the performance and behavioral analytics that marketers need to improve the full customer journey, through customer and product insights. These insights help you drive retention, revenue, and relationships, and increase the effectiveness of your marketing.

Marketing analytics empowers you to shorten the distance from insight to action. You’re not left staring at a dashboard wondering “Now what?”—instead, you can quickly pivot your strategy based on what the data tells you. 

• Want to increase average order values? Marketing analytics shows you purchase trends that you can use to design product bundles.
• Noticing your acquisition costs creeping up? You can hone in on the best channels, campaigns, and customers to adjust spend or content right away. 

By having a comprehensive view of your customers and products, you’re set up to continuously find and seize opportunities for growth.

The state of the market today: data-rich, insight-poor

Today’s B2C companies face a challenging reality: they collect more customer data than ever before but struggle to turn it into actionable insights. 

Your business likely generates massive amounts of customer and product data. Every website visit, email open, social media interaction, and purchase offers valuable information. But without proper analytics tools, this behavioral data sits unused, wasting its potential to drive growth.

And that’s a problem. 74% of consumers expect more personalized experiences in 2025 and 66% expect brands to make them feel valued and understood, according to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report. 

Also, when asked what kinds of personalized shopping experiences make them feel most valued, consumers across all industries ranked hyperpersonalized discounts first—beating out other factors like recommendations from friends, product customization options, and loyalty programs when making repeat purchases.

Brands that fail to deliver personalized experiences risk losing customers to competitors that better understand their preferences. Marketing analytics bridges this gap by transforming raw data into meaningful insights that drive customer-centric strategies.

4 key benefits of going beyond performance reports

Effective analytics unlocks valuable insights that directly impact your bottom line and customer relationships. Here are 4 main ways they deliver concrete business value:

1. Grow conversions along every path to purchase

Understand what drives customers to buy—and where they drop off. Marketing analytics lets you track full customer journeys across channels, from first interaction to repeat purchase.

You can drill into performance by audience, season, or campaign to see what’s working and where to optimize. Whether you want to analyze funnel conversion rates or compare journeys across high-value segments, analytics gives you a clear path forward.

2. Automate customer retention and churn prevention

Marketing analytics helps you identify which customers are at risk of leaving—and when they’re most likely to come back.

By analyzing past and predicted behavior, you can time and personalize outreach that keeps customers engaged. Triggered flows and predictive models make it easy to deliver the right message at the right moment, increasing loyalty and customer lifetime value without added effort.

3. Boost sales with suggested products and bundles

Product and purchase insights fuel smarter selling. With analytics, you can identify top-performing items, discover high-converting bundles, and recommend products based on each customer’s behavior.

Predictive tools surface what customers are likely to buy next, so you can personalize upsell and cross-sell messages that drive repeat purchases and increase average order value.

4. Seamlessly move from insight to action

Marketing analytics is most powerful when it’s actionable—helping you turn insights into campaigns—fast.

You should be able to easily segment customers, launch targeted flows, or adjust your strategy using built-in recommendations and templates, all from the same platform as your marketing tools, so you can act in real time without exporting data or switching systems.

Essential marketing analytics metrics to track

Diving into performance and marketing analytics without knowing which metrics matter is like walking into a grocery store without a shopping list—you’ll end up with a cart full of stuff you don’t need and still miss the ingredients for dinner.

Let’s fix that by breaking down the essential metrics you should actually care about.

Acquisition metrics: finding your customers

These metrics tell you how effectively you’re bringing new people into your world:

• Form conversion rates reveal how well your lead capture is working. Low rates might mean your form is too long, your offer isn’t compelling, or you’re attracting the wrong visitors in the first place.
• Traffic sources show you where your visitors come from. Beyond the basics (organic, paid, social, email), dig deeper to identify specific campaigns or content pieces driving quality traffic.
• Welcome series engagement measures how new subscribers interact with your onboarding. This early engagement often predicts long-term customer value.
• Subscriber-to-customer conversion ratio tracks how many email or SMS subscribers actually become paying customers. This metric separates list growth from actual business impact.

Engagement and behavior metrics: understanding their actions

Once people enter your ecosystem, these metrics help you understand what they’re doing:

• Site behavior and engagement patterns reveal how people move through your digital properties. Look for common paths, where visitors spend the most time and, crucially, where they drop off.
• Customer drop-off points identify exactly where potential customers abandon their journey. These friction points are some of your biggest opportunities for improvement.
• Email,SMS, and mobile app message engagement rates go beyond opens and clicks to show content resonance. Track opens, clicks, and orders from email, SMS and mobile app messages. 
• Campaign engagement shows which specific messages drive action. Compare metrics across different campaign types to refine your approach.
• Personalization effectiveness measures lift from dynamic content. Compare the performance of personalized blocks against static content using A/B tests to quantify personalization ROI.

Revenue metrics: measuring impact

These metrics connect marketing directly to money:

• Revenue per recipient measures how much money each message generates. This helps compare campaign effectiveness regardless of list size differences.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV) projects total revenue from a customer relationship. Segment this by acquisition source, first product purchased, or customer cohort for deeper insights.
• Repeat purchase rates show customer loyalty in action. Track time between purchases to optimize your retention campaign timing.
• Average order value helps understand purchasing behavior. Monitor how this changes based on marketing tactics, promotions, and product recommendations.

Predictive indicators: looking ahead

The most sophisticated analytics help you peer into the future:

• Purchase probability scores, or predicted number of orders, rank customers by likelihood of buying soon. Use these to target marketing efforts at people already leaning toward purchase.
• Churn risk indicators flag customers showing signs they might leave. Early intervention with these customers can dramatically improve retention.
• Next-purchase predictions anticipate what customers want before they know it themselves. These power your cross-sell and up-sell campaigns.
• Customer segment migration tracks how customers move between segments over time. Watch for patterns as casual buyers become VIPs or active customers start to disengage.
• Predicted CLV helps you invest appropriately in customer relationships from the start. Use this to tailor acquisition spending and early customer experiences.

By focusing on these metrics—rather than vanity numbers that look impressive, but don’t influence decisions—you’ll be more likely to build a marketing analytics framework that actually delivers growth. 

6 common challenges in marketing analytics implementation

Even with the best intentions, implementing marketing analytics can feel like trying to build a house of cards in a windstorm. Just when you think you’ve got everything balanced, something shifts. 

Here are the 6 most common challenges you’ll face—and why they matter to your bottom line:

1. Data fragmentation and silos

Your marketing data is probably scattered across a dozen different platforms right now. 

Email engagement lives in your email platform. Website behavior sits in Google Analytics. Social metrics are split between 4 different networks. And your CRM? That’s where sales keeps their customer data—which may or may not align with what marketing has.

This fragmentation isn’t just frustrating—it creates an incomplete view of your customers. You might think you’re crafting the perfect experience based on email behavior, but you’re actually missing the fact that the same customer is working through an issue with your support team.

The problem gets worse as you add more marketing channels. Each new platform creates another data island that needs bridges to connect it with everything else. Without a unified customer view, personalization efforts fall flat and campaign effectiveness suffers.

2. Data quality issues

Poor data quality shows up in many forms: inconsistent collection methods, duplicate records, and missing information. 

Let’s say your ecommerce platform tracks purchase amounts including shipping costs, while your email marketing platform records only product value without shipping. Now you have conflicting revenue data that makes it impossible to calculate true ROI.

The stakes get even higher when you bring AI and predictive analytics into the mix. AI relies on machine learning, which means it needs holistic, accurate datasets to make the right recommendations. 

Feed it bad data, and you’ll get bad predictions—it’s that simple. This isn’t just a technical issue; it directly impacts business decisions and customer experiences.

3. Technical complexity

Implementing robust analytics systems requires specialized knowledge that many marketing teams simply don’t have in-house. The learning curve is steep, and the technical debt accumulates quickly if you don’t get it right from the start.

Consider what’s involved: you need to understand data architecture, API integrations, tracking implementation, and often custom coding. 

Most marketing teams need to bring in developers—who don’t come cheap—to set up proper analytics infrastructure. Then there’s the ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting when systems and processes inevitably break.

Finding skilled analysts who understand both the technical side and the marketing implications is another challenge. These unicorns command premium salaries and are in high demand. Even if you manage to find and hire them, you’ll still need to train your existing team to become more data-literate so they can actually use the insights.

The balancing act between simplicity and sophistication is perhaps the trickiest part. Too simple, and you miss valuable insights. Too complex, and nobody uses the system because it’s too hard to understand.

4. Attribution challenges

Ever tried to figure out exactly which marketing touchpoint convinced a customer to buy? Welcome to the attribution challenge—one of marketing’s most persistent headaches.

Traditional last-click attribution models give all the credit to the final touchpoint before purchase. This might show your email campaign driving conversions while ignoring the fact that customers initially found you through paid search and were nurtured by your social content for weeks before that email arrived.

Multi-touch attribution attempts to solve this by distributing credit across all touchpoints, but it comes with its own complexities. How do you weigh each interaction? Is the first touchpoint more important than middle ones? Should the last touch still get extra credit?

Without accurate attribution, you risk investing in the wrong channels and undervaluing the campaigns that are actually driving awareness and consideration early in the customer journey.

5. Integration hurdles

Most companies aren’t starting from scratch—they’re trying to connect legacy systems with modern analytics platforms. This creates integration challenges that can derail even the most promising analytics initiatives.

API limitations restrict what data can be shared between platforms. Compatibility issues arise when trying to connect systems built on different technologies or data structures. Security protocols may block certain integrations entirely.

Native integrations (those built directly between platforms) are always preferable to custom-built connections because they’re more reliable and require less maintenance. But they’re not always available between the exact systems you’re using.

These technical hurdles often lead to compromises in your analytics strategy or expensive custom development work that may still not deliver the seamless data flow you need for accurate insights.

6. Translating insights into action

Perhaps the most frustrating challenge of all is this: generating brilliant insights that never lead to actual changes in your marketing approach.

Many organizations struggle with the “last mile” problem—they have mountains of data and sophisticated analysis, but can’t effectively translate those insights into marketing actions. 

For example, you might have a wealth of customer data about their purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics. 

But if your business infrastructure, process, or tools can’t surface these insights in a meaningful way, you’ll miss out on opportunities to use that data to drive growth—whether that’s by creating customized promotions or offering proactive product recommendations.

Modern marketing analytics platforms for B2C businesses

From the challenges we’ve outlined, you might conclude that implementing marketing analytics seems a bit daunting. And you wouldn’t be wrong. 

So how do you overcome these obstacles and start turning your data into actionable insights? The answer lies in selecting the right analytics platform.

Unfortunately, most generic analytics platforms weren’t built with B2C companies in mind—they were designed for everyone, which means they’re perfect for no one.

A purpose-built B2C platform delivers significantly better results because it understands your specific challenges and customer journeys.

When shopping for a marketing analytics platform, prioritize these features:

• Real-time data processing lets you react to customer behavior as it happens, not days later when the opportunity is gone.
• Omnichannel tracking and attribution connects the dots across touchpoints so you can see how your email, SMS, web, and social efforts work together.
• Machine learning and AI-powered insights surface patterns humans would miss, and automate the heavy analytical lifting.
• Visual reporting and dashboards make complex data accessible to everyone on your team, not just the data scientists.
• Action-oriented, data-backed recommendations bridge the gap between insights and execution, so you’re not left wondering, “Now what?”

The good news? Klaviyo, the only CRM built for B2C, is specifically designed with these features at the forefront. 

Klaviyo combines unified customer and product data with native reporting capabilities that make implementation significantly easier. The result: faster optimization cycles, more personalized customer experiences, and, ultimately, higher conversion rates and revenue. 

With Klaviyo, B2C marketers can access all their customer and product-level analytics in one place, gain insights into everything from campaign performance to lifetime value to product trends, and then act on those insights immediately using built-in tools like segmentation, benchmarks, and automated flows.

Additional resources

• What is marketing reporting? 
• What is a B2B CRM?
• What is a marketing campaign?