It makes sense that business owners and even some marketers would mix up the roles of marketing analytics and attribution. They essentially represent two sides of the same coin and can be used to generate insights on the same marketing campaigns and strategies.

The differences between these two data-driven efforts are subtle, but they're important. Analytics may be more recognizable, thanks to free resources like Google Analytics and a long history of using analytics to illuminate the performance of digital marketing. But attribution is no longer negotiable, especially with brands using a range of channels to reach their target audience.

You need both to build winning digital campaigns. Here's a quick primer on what makes each unique and important to your company.

When was the last time you checked to see if you were actually reaching your target audience? Many SMBs have only a vague idea of who their customers are and even less understanding of how to connect with them. At the very least, a failure to reach your intended audience means missed sales. Luckily, today there are free digital tools to help you define, reach and convert your audience.

If you've begun to measure website performance, the amount of data that's available can be overwhelming. (If you haven't started measuring your web performance yet, here's a guide to web analytics tools from Search Engine Land.) But you don't have to get bogged down in analysis paralysis. If you're like most SMBs, there are four key metrics to focus on that will tell you how your website is doing.

1. Traffic Referrals

Traffic referrals tell you how users reached your site, whether it was from paid advertising, search engines, blogs or social media sites. This tells you where your marketing or publicity efforts are paying off and may also point you to potential site partners. If you're getting a lot of traffic from a particular website, you might want to turn that connection into a more formal business relationship.

When it comes to using digital marketing for recruitment, it's no longer a question of if the tools are valuable, but of how you're going to implement them. Paper resumes are a thing of the past in an age where all of a candidate's data can be found online — however, according to the Society for Human Resource Managers, 68 percent of HR managers are finding it difficult to find talent. Here are some tips on using the tools of digital marketing for recruitment to connect with prospective employees.

When it comes to auto dealer marketing, these days, the first rule is not to talk about the dealership. According to a new study from Google, a customer can make as many as 900 digital interactions in the lead-up to purchase. By comparison, the same customer will only visit two dealers in the process.

This doesn't represent an entirely new way of doing business. Dealerships have long known that customers can take months to process a car-buying decision. But with the ease of information readily available on mobile, consumers are now researching while standing in line at the grocery store, waiting to pick up their kids or over lunch. Getting those customers in the door is a matter of how you interact with them in the micro-moments during the path to purchase.

Marketers today have so much on their plate when it comes to marketing technology, regardless of whether they work at a multinational corporation or a small mom-and-pop shop. At big companies, where you would often have an entire marketing department working with you, it's still easy to feel overwhelmed — but when you work at a small or medium business, where you might be the only marketer in the company, where do you even begin? A digital marketing partner may be the best decision you can make for your business.

It's time to start thinking about back-to-school marketing ideas. Retailing Today cited a report that 62 percent of households plan to reduce back-to-school spending this year. So, with these expected cutbacks, how can you get a jump on your competitors to make sure you're ready when parents and students get ready for the first day of school? Here's some ideas.

Kids Love Facebook

Kids influence purchase decisions, so if you want to create a buzz among young people, target students using social media and promote your products where they hang out. According to a report from Common Sense Media, 45 percent of teens and tweens use social media every day. Think about incorporating your products into a Facebook game with a sponsored link.

Analytics aren't just for enterprise businesses looking for high-level data insights. In today's business world, the importance of data analysis extends all the way down to small mom-and-pop shops serving their local communities. Part of this trend is due to the broad availability of analytics tools. Google Analytics offers free insights to any company or user, and other, low-cost tools make it easy to reveal simple but influential insights about how your company does business. But it's also a matter of staying competitive.

There are a lot of ways performance can be measured, and the metrics can get confusing and misleading fast. For small businesses focused on building a presence within a region, the importance of data analysis can be distilled down to a few keys data points that shed light on how well you're reaching an audience.

With so many digital marketing channels at your disposal — paid ads, organic search, email, blogs and social media, just to name a few — it's easy to lose track of what's working and where there's room for improvement. That's where a careful media audit can be of service. You can do an audit of your digital marketing to gather up and analyze all of your data coming from different sources, and then use that information to guide strategy and decision making.

Here's a quick guide to help you start your media audit off on the right foot.

You have to consider many variables when planning even a single digital ad: type of ad, visual elements, accompanying text, audience targeting, landing page composition, marketing channel and so on. When you're busy plotting the perfect combination of these factors, it's easy to forget another crucial aspect of advertising campaign planning: ad frequency.

Frequency is simply the number of times a customer will see your digital advertisement. While it might seem like an afterthought or something to figure out after you launch the campaign, frequency has huge implications on not only the success of an ad, but also on the audience's perception of your brand. If improperly managed, frequency can be the reason that ads don't deliver optimal returns or backfire altogether and estrange consumers who might otherwise be interested in your brand.