The Importance of Digital Marketing Analytics
One of the most important components of any digital marketing campaign is analytics – the set of tools that allow you to track and measure your website’s performance. In fact, analytics is so important that many businesses rely on it to determine their ad spend, return on investment and even whether or not they should continue with a particular campaign.
In short, if online advertising is something you’re considering, then you need to have a rock-solid understanding of what your goals are and how you can use data from your analytics program to achieve them.
It is also important to understand that analytics is not just a tool that can be used to measure the success of your website or campaign. It can also be used to identify areas of improvement, as well as help you make decisions regarding your business’ future direction.
How businesses use digital marketing analytics
1) To determine the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns (i.e., ad spend, return on investment, etc.),
Companies measure metrics such as conversion rates and click-throughs. Conversion rates are defined by company’s website or app to be how many people who visit a specific page actually follow through with an action that leads them closer to completing some goal related to the content they saw in said webpage/app i.e., signing up for a newsletter signup form is considered a conversion when someone signs up for your email list after visiting your website or downloading an application from Apple Store.2) To track the performance of their website and conversion rates for each page. This allows them to identify which pages are performing well and which ones aren’t, so they can make changes accordingly.
2) To track how customers are interacting with their site (i.e., bounce rates, time spent on site, etc.).
This helps businesses gauge how successful their website is at delivering what customers want and will help them better understand where they need to improve. These statistics also give valuable insight into which areas of the website or marketing campaigns may be working well and which ones might need some fine-tuning in order for a business to achieve its goals more effectively.
3) To identify which channels are most effective at driving traffic to their website.
This allows them to focus their efforts on those channels that are proven to be successful and drop those that aren’t. There is a lot of room for experimentation with different marketing strategies, so it’s important not only what the strategy but also how you execute it in order for your business or brand message to resonate with consumers.
4) To identify and target potential customers before they actually visit your website.
This is known as “targeted advertising” and is a very powerful tool for businesses looking to grow quickly. Targeted advertising can be done through digital marketing, which includes search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, content management systems (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal with the help of analytics software tools such as Google Analytics or Adobe Omniture SiteCatalyst that are used to track visitors’ activities on websites in order to determine what type of advertisements will work best for them.
5) To track how customers interact with a website
The best analytics programs also allow you to track how your customers are interacting with your company online, both through social media and via email marketing campaigns. This can help you determine which types of messages resonate with your audience the most, so you can optimize your messaging accordingly in the future. Analytics software allows for a variety of data collection methods that span across all areas of digital marketing: website traffic analysis (web-based), web statistics (including search engine rankings), conversion rates from leads into sales opportunities, customer sentiment analysis based on emails or social media comments received by an organization’s employees and business partners over time as well as engagement metrics such as page views per visit or number of content shares per day.
How Do You Choose an Analytics Program?
There are many different analytics programs out there, each offering different features and capabilities – the only question is, which one do you choose?
Most businesses rely on free Google Analytics to get information about their websites. In the enterprise world, you will often also come across Adobe Analytics which has a paid only version and works best when it is used with the Adobe Content Management System (Adobe Experience Manager). The two competing systems are very similar as they both offer comprehensive analytics tools that help to measure marketing efforts, website traffic, conversions, ROI on advertising spend etc.
Google Analytics is free and is a very good tool for measuring website traffic. It provides comprehensive information about website visitors, including where they came from, which pages they visited and what they did on the site. The data is presented in easy to understand reports that can be seen at a glance. Google Analytics also has advanced features such as conversion tracking, funnel reports, cohort analysis and more that are only available with the paid enterprise version of Google Analytics (which is called Google Analytics 360).
A key feature of Google analytics is its ability to provide real time reporting so that businesses can see how their website is performing in real time as things happen. It makes it possible to monitor user behaviour on a live website so that if there are any problems caused by technical issues or traffic spikes, these can be quickly identified and resolved before any serious damage is done. Furthermore, this live data can be used for things like A/B testing where different versions of a page are tested simultaneously against each other.
Tag Management Solutions
When using either Analytics tools, it is important to have a good understanding of the Tag management solutions such as Google Tag Manager. The use of these solutions allow for greater flexibility and control over how tracking codes are deployed in your website or app without having to worry about manual coding from scratch. They also make it easier for you to test your tags before deploying them live on your site or app. These tag managers can be used with various technologies including analytics, web content management systems (CMS), and email marketing software that all require tagging data collection/management capabilities.
