Mid Year Review | Marketing Analytics, Goals & Strategy Updates

As we move into the second half of the year, businesses are doing their mid year review, assessing the outcomes of their marketing strategies, and making adjustments for better performance in the months ahead. This year, so far, has been marked by geopolitical uncertainties and economic fluctuations. These factors have introduced a level of unpredictability in the global market. It makes it all the more essential for businesses to use data analytics to guide their marketing efforts.

In times of market turbulence, understanding your metrics is crucial. It allows businesses to redirect their marketing budget toward the strategies and channels that are delivering results. Rather than sticking to rigid plans that may no longer be working, data-driven decisions can help adapt to these challenges. This approach allows you to focus on what matters most: achieving meaningful outcomes. Here, we will dive into how to assess your marketing performance mid year review, identify key metrics, and adjust your strategy for optimal results.

The Role of the Data

The world is constantly moving, and the easiest way to stay alert is through Data. By analyzing metrics, you can adjust your approach to account for any shifts or market trends. The ability to allocate resources toward high-performing strategies, optimize campaigns, and adjust budgets in response to emerging trends or constant behaviors is crucial. This flexibility can be the key to staying competitive, regardless of the external forces at play.

Understanding What Metrics Matter

Before diving into data analysis, it’s essential to know which metrics your marketing strategy aims to improve. Whether your primary goal is to generate web traffic, increase social media followers, or drive online sales, identifying these key performance indicators (KPIs) early on can help shape your analysis. For instance:

Awareness

For businesses leveraging platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc. You might be focused on gaining video views, impressions, and reach for your social media ads. You may also monitor open rates on Email campaigns along with other visibility-related metrics.

Traffic

This is a common goal for many marketing campaigns. If driving traffic is one of your primary objectives, key metrics to consider include clicks, sessions, page views, social media followers, bounce rate, and engagement rate on your website. For social media and paid advertising, key metrics include impressions and clicks.

Conversions

If the end goal is to generate revenue, then conversions (i.e., completed purchases or sign-ups) are a critical metric. Monitoring key metrics such as purchases, conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS) is essential. These metrics will guide your decisions for your advertising campaigns.

Understanding these goals will help keep your mid year review focused and relevant. It’s easy to get lost in the data, but sticking to the key metrics will keep your efforts aligned with your overall objectives.

Regularly Review Your Data Sources

Practical data analysis requires regular monitoring of the various platforms that feed your information, highlighting the importance of making a quarterly and mid year review. These platforms include Google Analytics, advertising platforms, email marketing software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Each of these sources provides data on different stages of your marketing funnel, and understanding where they fit is essential.

Top of the Funnel

Advertising platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads typically provide the first touchpoints with potential customers. Social media platforms and email platforms also serve as initial contact points. Key metrics at this stage include impressions, clicks, and content views on social media platforms, as well as open rates on email campaigns. These are clear examples of what you should measure at the top of the funnel during your quarterly review.

Middle of the Funnel

This is where potential leads begin to engage more deeply with your brand. To measure this engagement effectively, you’ll want to track metrics across multiple platforms. These include email services like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign, GA4, social media channels, and advertising platforms.

Key engagement metrics to monitor include email click-through rates, ad clicks, social media post interactions, and follower growth. Pay particular attention to engagement rates on both organic social content and paid social ads. It’s also crucial to assess how well your marketing strategy aligns with your website strategy.

Bottom of the Funnel: 

At this stage of the funnel, the CRM is one of the most important places to focus on. The location where the main conversions occur is equally critical to monitor. Key metrics to track include lead forms, revenue, and average order value (AOV). You should also monitor conversion rate and customer lifetime value (CLV) across all campaigns and sources.

Typically, GA4 is one of the most important places to look for conversions, as it is where web and app conversions are tracked and recorded. Here, you should be able to check and attribute the metrics mentioned above to each marketing effort. However, it could change depending on where your strategy is focused. For example, it could be addressed by optimizing purchases on Meta or a lead form campaign on LinkedIn. In such cases, the metrics should be checked on Meta and LinkedIn, respectively, and correctly attributed to the campaign, ad, or post that brought that conversion.

Identifying What’s Working: Analyzing Key Metrics

Once you have a grasp of your key metrics and data sources, the next step is to identify which parts of your marketing strategy are performing the best. This requires consistent tracking and comparing metrics from different channels, as well as benchmarks, to spot trends and patterns.

For instance, if you’re focusing on top-of-the-funnel metrics and notice low visibility, this signals a need for change. Examples include low email open rates and few impressions at a high cost per thousand impressions (CPM). When these issues arise, it might be time to adjust your strategy. Sometimes, small tweaks like changing email wording, expanding social media ad audiences, or creating more attention-grabbing content can help.

When it comes to the mid-funnel marketing level, areas for improvement may include low CTR levels on ads, emails sent, or social media posts. Other issues might involve a low session rate per ad click, poorly qualified sessions on the website, and a poor engagement rate on social media posts.

Improving it might be tricky, but here are some tips. 

• Change your bidding strategy on ads to guarantee a high number of clicks and a high engagement rate per click.
• Ensure your content is relevant to the target audience by selecting images that have had a higher impact.
• Review the wording of your emails and check whether it is relevant and well-targeted to the audience you are trying to reach and engage with
• Check whether your Google tag is installed correctly and is receiving the necessary information.
• Review on GA4, which efforts are bringing the highest number of traffic, and what traffic is more qualified. Here, you can view the engagement rate on the website, the number of pages visited per session, and the time spent on the website to see which tactics are yielding the better results.
• Check your advertising and social media platforms to see where your clicks are coming from. Look for ads and posts with higher clicks and interactions. If the goal is to drive traffic to a website, review how many of those clicks are link clicks.
• Keeping users in the loop is always a great idea, which is why monitoring secondary conversions and their sources should be on your to-do list. This includes newsletter sign-ups, CTA clicks, calls to any phone number you might have online, and messages on social media. Having data on where those secondary events are coming from might help you generate leads and revenue in the future.

Finally, when discussing the bottom-level funnel, as mentioned above, conversions, conversion rate, revenue, CPA, and conversion life values are the most important metrics to track.

A couple of tips that you should follow are:

• On GA4, look for efforts that generate the highest number of leads and qualify them in the CRM. Additionally, you should visit the platforms designed to generate leads to determine which is more cost-effective, such as advertising, Email, Social media, Etc.
• In the case of e-commerce, you will likely look for purchases per effort, revenue, and CPA. To achieve this, you can use GA4 or advertising e-commerce platforms to review and match the data, thereby gaining a holistic view of where to allocate more budget.
• If you’re not seeing conversions, ensure that your advertising bids are set to drive conversions. Using well-targeted remarketing campaigns will also increase your chances of conversions.
• Use data from the middle funnel, such as tactics that generated the highest engagement rate or secondary events, to optimize the budget towards it and improve your chances of converting.

Key Takeaways

As we move through 2025, the ability to assess and adjust your marketing efforts quickly has never been more critical. Uncertainty, economic volatility, and changing consumer behaviors are challenges that every business must face. However, by leveraging data analysis and a mid year review of your marketing metrics, you can stay ahead of the curve.

By focusing on the key metrics that matter most to your business, whether they belong to the top, middle, or bottom of the funnel, and continuously optimizing based on performance, you can ensure that your marketing efforts remain agile, cost-effective, and aligned with your overall business goals.

In times of uncertainty, the best strategy is to let data guide your decisions and keep evolving based on what the numbers are telling you. After all, incorporating quarterly data reviews into your marketing strategy is crucial for staying on top of first-party trends that can be leveraged to maximize your efforts.

Ready to take your marketing strategy to the next level? Schedule a call with our team today, and let’s discuss how we can leverage data to drive your success!