arrow
Back to blog

Access Your Mobile Marketing ROI: Best Analytics Tools 2021

clock

9 min read

Simply put, ROI, or return on investment, is the foothold in your predictive analysis of the investment consequences. This metric, or to be exact, the percentage rate, allows evaluating the efficiency of the intended investment in different business realms and assets. That’s why it possesses the universal character of usage and is easily understood by different specialists coming from various industries.

ROI meaning refers to a comparison of ‘what is paid’ (costs) and ‘what is earned’ (profit), so you can quickly foresee the results of any funding action. What’s more, you can use this ratio to distinguish between the different investment options and find the golden mean among them. That’s what is currently done by the larger part of the SEO, content, and e-mail marketing specialists who aim at bringing analytics and automation to their daily operations. In 2020, the most prominent channels of the ROI revolution were online advertising, YouTube, and Instagram. In 2021, global advertisers anticipate having 1.06 dollars in return for every dollar spent on media marketing. Meanwhile, ROI solutions are now widely spread across businesses focused on product development and app creation specifically.

Why so? A demand for digitalization calls for reconsidering the means of marketing influence for the sake of a good return on investment. That’s why the tech-savvy companies are usually among the pioneers of ROI ’taming,’ but the question is which benchmarks are good in this regard. Traditionally, the annual return on investment of 7% or greater is believed to be good when it comes to stocks. At the same time, the double-digit ROI will be good if we speak about fledging companies that only learn how to amplify and scale their profit results. Besides, the ROI depends on the type of investment: equipment => ROI in productivity, SEO => ROI in lead generation, marketing campaigns => ROI in sales, etc. And for all these seed money directions, the optimal ROI will be different, so better grasp how to calculate it first.

How to Calculate ROI, Knowing Its Limitations?

There are 2 ways to cope with the ROI analysis, but each ROI formula accounts for the comparison of current profit and investment expenses:

1) ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100

2) ROI = (Present Value – Cost of Investment / Cost of Investment) x 100

Whatever one you select, the outcome of your calculations will be similar, but please remember that this metric totally excludes capital gains taxes or any fees connected with buying/selling the shares, so the cost of investment in this equation doesn’t represent the real state of things. In addition, ROI misses out on the factor of time, being unable to forecast the compound interest in progress. However, you can use this percentage as the jumping-off point for defining the highest yield across the several investment choices.

After that, think thoroughly about the extent of risk you’re to deal with when bringing your investment idea into action. That’s important as another shortcoming of the ROI analysis is the failure of taking account of risk. It implies that an investor should deliberately anticipate the cost of losing money and work out the anti-crisis strategy to respond to emergencies. Targeting a riskier stock, market, or asset type always goes with the greater hidden risks equated with the higher returns. So, think twice before investing!

But what can help you not to error is the annualized ROI calculation:

Annualized ROI = {[1 + (Net Profit / Cost of Investment)] (1/n) – 1} x 100,

where n stands for the number of years of your planning expenditure.

If measuring the ROI indices in this way, you’re likely to get more accurate results, but still only in the financial context. This formula also neglects the transaction fees, maintenance costs, and other ancillary expenses, which leaves much space for manipulation: either an exaggeration of expected benefits or an underestimation of real costs. In the meantime, if we add all these constituents into the formula, it’ll become too complicated and overloaded, isn’t it?

What Is Marketing ROI, and How to Quantify It?

Though the sphere of ROI implementation has been much extended in recent times, marketing ROI remains in the lead, especially if we take the analysis of the software product’s profitability or mobile app investment. What’s peculiar about it? ROI in marketing embodies a revenue growth model that is realized within a series of marketing initiatives. In other words, that’s the metric that assesses the effectiveness of a certain marketing campaign. Thus, in this case, one will pay attention to the calculation of costs and gains involved in marketing.

Let’s specify the marketing ROI formula to get it clear:

ROI in marketing (ROMI) = (Sales Growth - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost

However, to estimate the marketing campaign outcomes and see the sales trend more precisely, it’s better to extend its duration to a year. In its turn, this decision will bring another perk to you — an ability to digitize the average organic sales growth, so you need to correct the formula correspondingly:

ROMI = (Sales Growth - Average Organic Sales Growth - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost

Why is it valuable? Because the speed of your organic growth is the clear indicator of your product’s sales expansion by internal means, like promotions, new features/versions of the product, enhanced customer engagement, process optimization, and many more. Compared to inorganic growth, which usually results from business acquisitions and mergers, organic one signifies the company’s capacity to hold sway over its business operations in a smart way, without delegating this responsibility to the other parties. Hence, by including it into this equation, you’ll analyze your business profitability more effectively.

What Are Top ROI Tools to Use in 2021?

Now you’re ready to cut to the chase and discuss the best ROI tools that will be your good companions in analyzing the product’s profitability and planning your further investment into its development. In the list below, we’ve collected the helpful mixture of both ROI sales tools and

ROI tools for marketing as they usually work together for the same result — help your business grow in scale and raise its revenue. Let’s go!

Google Analytics

That’s probably one of the most important data-driven marketing tools that lets you quickly come into the users’ engagement, guests’ activity, and traffic fluctuations. Though it’s more used for website behavior analysis, you also need Google Analytics for tracking any brand’s performance: starting from social media like Instagram and ending up with the mobile apps. If you’re specifically interested in the latter, this freemium ROI tool will help you measure in-app payments for both iOS and Android products, get customized reports for developers, see the user acquisition trend, and work on retention. You need to pay only for the advanced features as the proficient annual subscription plan, Analytics 360 version, which price starts at $150,000 per annum.

SEMrush

A similar ROI tool with a strong SEO focus. Thanks to it, you’ll fill in your content with the right keywords to connect the target audience with the necessary information. By this, the simultaneous promotion of your services or a product occurs online, while the customer base is naturally extended. Besides, this ROI tool will provide in-depth competitors’ analysis and valuable insights for your marketing strategy correction. The price is average on the market — $119.95 per month for the basic services package, but you can opt for the ancillary benefits if you wish.

AdRoll

One of the top digital marketing data platforms that stirs your revenue growth with suitable brand advertising solutions. Namely, with AdRoll, you can increase your customer reach by understanding your audience’s demographics, interests, and acute problems. Besides, this ROI tool aims at establishing a long-term relationship with your buyers through e-mails, ads, and on-site/in-app recommendations. Finally, AdRoll is also good at protecting your customers’ data, which also adds much to their brand loyalty. Altogether, this useful package of services will cost you only $19 a month.

Litmus

As e-mail marketing is often a part of the marketing nucleus, your resort to Litmus will assist you with timely and proper communication with your customers. One of its serious advantages is the integration with the most popular e-mail service providers. As a result, your target audience is supplied with the most relevant news, updates, reports, etc. at a right time. Surely, it’ll boost your ROI, so don’t spare $99 per month to let it work for you!

SendFox

Can be called a competitor of Litmus. Here, you’re also involved in e-mail marketing with the difference of focusing on leads attraction. The business application of SendFox revolves around the full user conversion journey, so you can create the scheduled and automated mailing lists and build the conversion bridge to your product. Depending on the size of your contacts list and sending requests preferences, you can use free, monthly ($18), or lifetime ($49) plans.

BuzzSumo

Effective communication with your customers stems not only from the quality of your content but firstly from the understanding of what matters to them the most. BuzzSumo will help you find answers to this complicated question through professional discovery, research, influencer marketing, and trends monitoring. Make your marketing strategy based on the real-time data with BuzzSumo for $99, $179, or $299 per month — all is determined by the number of account users, exports volume, and a number of custom feeds. Meanwhile, to try your hand at this marketing ROI tool, welcome to test its 30-day trial version and form your first impression about it!

HubSpot

It’s truly one of the major ROI tools for sales in 2021, which will support you in leading your business in the traffic-increasing direction through improved customer engagement and marketing optimization. In particular, through the Sales Hub, you can easily manage your pipeline, nurture leads, and synchronize your calls with the desired CRM. In addition, you can also refer to the marketing, service, operations, and CSM spaces to unite all these dimensions together in a single powerful entity. Though Hubspot has some free features, in most cases, you’re most likely to aspire for the additional services as well: as a starter, professional, or enterprise.

Keyhole

In case you’re racking your brain over an effective social media strategy, Keyhole is the right match for your needs! First, it literally allows you to penetrate your customers’ minds and see your brand with their eyes. Second, it facilitates social monitoring reporting and enables quick and easy data sharing with the team. Third, Keyhole reduces your time to the market by gathering your social analytics in one place. Finally, this marketing ROI tool hints at the best ways to capture your customers’ attention and proceed with traffic tracking as simple as that. Be ready to invest $79 per month after your trial period ends.

BrandMentions

Have you imagined that competitors spying would become legal one day? BrandMentions will fall on a sword for you by quantifying your brand marketing impact in comparison to your rivals. Being a great option for small businesses, this ROI tool enables you to launch your reputation management through real-time notifications and tight links to your brand awareness campaigns. Thus, if such aims as influencer reach, customer care enhancement and audience growth resonate with you, give it a shot for $99 per month and then switch to the well-packed accounts for $299 or $499.

Unbounce

Do you see your visitors coming to your site/app and quickly bouncing off the main page? Unbounce will help you find the reason for this brand positioning failure and suggest the working tactics to increase the marketing value of your landing page. Make the users’ first impression unforgettable from the very start with Unbounce! After the 14-days trial, access to its smart conversion intelligence service will cost you at least $90 a month, but this can be enough in your particular case. Check it out!

And which ROI tools suit you the best?

If you were attentive to the question, then your answer consists of a few ROI tools’ names. And it isn’t very astonishing, believe us, if you really intend on building a strong marketing campaign around your software product. To scale your ROI and allow it to come from multiple channels, you certainly need to combine the various analytical instruments into a well-set system that will allow you to know your customers better, provide them with excellent service, and gain a solid return on your investment. Isn’t that your mission? Knock to Dashdevs, and we’ll consult you on this matter in detail!

Share article

Table of contents