UK: Marketing, PR firms least likely to embrace analytics

A survey of business owners and marketers across the UK reveals that marketers and PR firms are the worst at measuring the ROI of their digital activities.

by Helen Leggatt

Ruler Analytics' survey of 1,000 business owners and marketers across the UK found that, on an index of 100, marketing and PR firms scored the lowest when it came to embracing analytics.

It was retailers that were the most likely to be using analytics in some form or another. Even then, less than a third said they analyzed the impact of their digital marketing spend.

Second to retailers were travel and tourism firms, followed by leisure and property.

Overall, 92% of the businesses surveyed use some kind of analytics software to review the performance of their website, but more than half (58%) of businesses were not satisfied with their current analytics software. While more than three-quarters (87%) tracked the number of website visits, and just under two thirds also tracked web form submissions or leads generated (64% each), few used their analytics to tell them the return on their digital marketing spend (21%). One in seven businesses (14%) did not regularly track any of these indicators.

Call tracking was the least likely to be used, found Ruler Analytics' report.

"While it might seem decidedly 20th Century to build this into a modern analytics framework, failure to do so can leave you missing a key part of the marketing puzzle," says the report. "The telephone plays a very specific role in the buying process for customers. While most of us will use online tools for research and assessing possible purchases of suppliers, for many, the telephone is still the channel used to finalize the deal."