If you're investing in digital marketing, small business data analytics should be top of mind as you link efforts like content, social media, ads and email to realize a return on your investment.

According to research from HubSpot, just 61 percent of marketers believe they have an effective strategy, while 24 percent have no idea whether their leads are turning into sales. In addition, 40 percent said proving ROI is a top challenge.

Those stats suggest there's a lot of room for improvement. However, the beauty of digital tech is that it allows for detailed tracking and analysis of everything you do — but only if you're set up correctly and know how to use the tools.

Marketing and communications teams have the ability to track an endless number of actions — from email opens, to link clicks and even time spent on specific pages. However, the volume of data relating to potential customers can often seem overwhelming.

The sheer quantity of available information might have marketers wondering exactly how data-driven marketing can be turned into customer action and increased conversions. Here are a few ways to get started.

Create Buyer Personas

One of the biggest opportunities created by data-driven marketing is the ability to take data and turn it into audience personas. Understanding your current customer base and using data points about them can help you predict your best future customer. Building a persona helps center your marketing around the customer and their expectations. From there you can target your media and your messaging and you're further along in developing a data informed marketing strategy.

Calculating a return on investment (ROI) for some businesses is much easier than others. For instance, if a retail store has onsite ecommerce set up to track revenue then you can apply a simple calculation to derive at your ROI. You'd take the revenue gained over the cost spent for your marketing effort as your ROI calculation. Having access to true monetary revenue makes it pretty straightforward for marketers to understand their campaign ROI performance. But what about those marketers that are not tracking ecommerce or a monetary value that enables them to track ROI? How can they measure ROI with metrics outside of dollars to convey the story of return for their campaign?

Marketing ROI that is not tied to monetary values can be a bit tougher to quantify — and in some cases much more subjective. You must lean on other telling metrics such as lift, engagement and conversions to prove to the client what our marketing efforts are doing for them. Moreover, marketers need to partner with a trusted and experienced digital team to help them understand what metrics matter for ROI.

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.

Ah, bounce rates. Many times marketers are puzzled by this metric. On one hand, it's a fairly easy concept to grasp. Your bounce rate is merely the percentage of people who land on a page and then leave your website without visiting another page on your site. On the other hand, it's some sort of a riddle, as other factors come into play when determining if your bounce rate is healthy for your site in particular. When analyzing your bounce rate, there are questions that typically run through your mind: What factors impact someone's decision to leave your site? How do you know if your rate is good or bad? If you have too many bounces, how do you fix it?

To help you better understand your bounce rate — and begin to improve it — we've put together an easy overview.

Building a digital campaign isn't the end of a marketer's hard work. Measuring performance is crucial to understanding value and future campaign decisions. Marketers and their leadership need to understand the cost of these campaigns relative to the value they bring in, particularly when compared to other digital campaigns.

No company wants to waste money on marketing strategies that don't pay off. Here's a simple guide to identifying the right metrics, measuring performance and making business decisions based on campaign ROI.

Though the vast majority of marketers are comfortable with making decisions based on broad analytics, such as cost per click, click-through rate and cost per acquisition, most marketing campaigns are more than just these numbers. To analyze digital marketing data from all angles, marketers need to take a deep dive into their campaigns using lesser-known marketing metrics and analytics tools. This could uncover hidden connections and information that further boosts business. Remember, it's important to investigate all channels and metrics of a campaign for determining the best suitable optimizations. Below are just a few metrics and tools that can lend more insight into your overall campaign activity.

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.

If you can't measure it, did it have an impact? Without website performance metrics, the only thing you can say for sure is that you don't know how your campaigns are working. Many businesses don't make it because they fail to learn from mistakes and course-correct. Google Analytics can give you the insights you need to make those changes. When Marketing Land compiled estimates for Google Analytics' 10th anniversary last fall, they put the number of websites using the service between 30 and 50 million.

Once you set up a Google Analytics account, you can monitor multiple websites. Each will have its own dashboard, featuring six broad categories and sub-menus. The service also provides you some examples of how to use the tools within each section to drive positive results for your business. Here are some of the metrics and how they can work for you.

Traditional advertising placed brand recognition at a premium. Digital marketing has expanded the possible goals of ads in today's commercial landscape, building direct channels for conversions and offering a myriad of other benefits that can be used to build a case for ROI.

But the value of brand awareness itself is just as important as ever — it's why a company like Apple doesn't even have to put its name on its billboards to effectively advertise a product. Consumers see the ad content and understand where it's coming from. Not every company can have such influential awareness at their disposal, but any brand can use consumer recognition as a measure of their success within a specific market.

The first step is testing that brand awareness, and there are several effective ways to figure that out.