Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel. Marketing analytics is the study of data garnered through marketing campaigns in order to discern patterns between such things as how a campaign contributed to conversions, consumer behavior, regional preferences, creative preferences and much more. The goal of marketing analytics as a practice is to use these patterns and findings to optimize future campaigns based on what was successful.