With the guarantee of improved precision, performance, and increased marketing return on investment, every eCommerce business should be using analytics to inform their marketing efforts. Yet, the plethora of innovative methodologies and tools available seem to paralyze organizations. Or they onboard analytics using a “peanut butter” approach—spreading it across the marketing department with a generalized methodology that waters down the firepower of what should be an integrated analytic approach.
Marketing analytics helps organizations define a vision, develop case studies, organize initiatives into a clear road map, and build capabilities to create strategic value and a competitive edge. Approximately 76% of marketing leaders base decisions on data analytics, citing competitive insights as the most significant factor in supporting marketing initiatives and strategic decisions.
Organizations that excel online deploy advanced analytics tools that convert data patterns into actionable insights. Analytics relies on big data. The average marker may use up to 17 different web analytics tools and applications to aggregate findings; however, it’s possible to subscribe to a narrower view and utilize far fewer once business goals and objectives of web development are determined.
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Benefits of Digital Analytics
Marketers must understand and engage target audiences to drive authentic conversions, retain customers and generate results. Companies that adopt a digital analytics approach most rapidly are poised for a competitive advantage. The obvious benefit is revenue growth, alongside subtler digital marketing ones that improve efficiency and enhance digital strategy.
Bottom-Line Benefits
- Generate higher returns in marketing and promotional investments
- Lower new customer acquisition costs
- Reduce customer churn
- Increase customer loyalty
- Improve customer service
- Enhance sales team effectiveness
- Boost sales to existing customers
Digital Marketing Benefits
Personalize Target Audience Segments
Digital analytics enables the study of how different customer segments behave and can predict these segments’ likelihood to respond to marketing campaigns. With advanced AI, companies can tailor timing, content, and the delivery channel to fit customer preferences. This increases the chances of conversion and reduces wasteful expenditure.
Improve Proactivity and Effectiveness
Certain digital analytics programs include solutions that perform data mining to develop and score predictive models. To some degree, this makes it possible to anticipate customer and market behavior and respond proactively.
Enhance Social Media Marketing Strategies
Digital analytics tools operate in real-time, providing a candid, external perspective on how target audiences behave on social media platforms. Whether it’s customer feedback or general engagement, organizations now have detailed data to refine marketing strategies and provide better customer service.
Gain a Comprehensive View of Marketing Activities
One of the presiding challenges of digital marketing is bringing together disparate marketing data across channels. Considering the explosion of channels (email, social media, brick-and-mortar locations, etc.), marketing analytics tools offer easier integration, accessibility, and analysis of multiple data sources.
Web Analytics Metrics To Track
If the goal of marketing is to reach qualified leads at the moments that most influence their decisions, what are the key performance indicators used to measure marketing performance? Clue: It’s not only revenue.
Additionally, not all marketing metrics are equal, either. For instance, vanity metrics appear positive, but they don’t always translate into meaningful data that drives conversion rates. Examples include the number of app downloads, page views, or social media shares.
While the most appropriate metrics vary from one campaign to another, marketers will always measure the effects a campaign has on customer behavior. The right metrics exert the most impact on business goals, which may be lead retention for one campaign and sales for another.
Although tracking as many KPIs as possible is tempting, starting with a few key business metrics is most effective. Then, you can strategically expand monitoring data that provides the most business value. Naturally, any digital marketing analysis must always align with company goals.
Unique Visitors
Google Analytics defines unique visitors as: “The number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time.” Tracking unique visitors gives organizations an idea of the size audience they’re attracting. When you separate the traffic data into recurring and unique visitors, you’re better able to determine how your marketing channels and campaigns are doing in relation to your digital marketing strategy.
For instance, let’s say a marketing campaign brings in 200 visitors to your website. They could be a mixture of unique or recurring visitors or one visitor returning 200 times. Why does this matter? Well, if you’re selling goods or services, there’s statistically a higher chance of making a sale with 200 unique visitors than fewer visitors making repeated visits.
Of course, it’s also true that returning visitors are likely to bring in more revenue than a once-off sale. This seems like a contradiction, but it perfectly illustrates the importance of data analytics, as both scenarios can ring true depending on the context. Regardless of conversion goals, having a complete data set on your business’s website traffic is vital.
Unique visitor metrics are important because they show stakeholders and marketers the number of impressions an ad will receive on your website. It also helps in selecting which ads to retarget to previous website visitors, and can guide strategists as they develop content to convert users into buying customers.
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Pageviews
Pageviews show how often visitors access a website or landing pages and are one of the most commonly tracked marketing analytics. They help determine what target audiences are interested in, how effective a page’s SEO is, and customer journey trends. This metric is especially useful when assessing traffic to individual pages.
For example, let’s say for the past month, your website has received average traffic overall. However, when you look at pricing page performance, you notice an unusually high number of page views. This could indicate more visitors were viewing that page (possible due to a pay-per-click sale advertisement), or the SEO change you made is working, or the page continues to tirelessly reload, due to a technical issue.
High pageviews could signify one of several things, which provides a good starting place to further investigate where the views came from and what users did after viewing the page. On the contrary, low views indicate the page isn’t appealing enough to attract visitors.
Every decent digital marketing strategy strives to garner more page views. If you’re struggling, you may want to review the quality of your content and ensure it’s of a high standard, as well as optimize your technical SEO and website layout.
To help leverage the most from pageview metrics, you should monitor how many pages users access in one day, whether they visit the same page, explore random pages on your website, or are compelled to visit just after payday. Understanding helps businesses make data-driven decisions like updating buyer personas or deciding when to schedule paid ads.
Traffic
Website traffic refers to the volume of users visiting a website. Various analytics tools make it possible to determine exactly where your website traffic is coming from. This matters because most marketing efforts adopt a multichannel marketing strategy, meaning they use different social media platforms, email marketing, and paid search advertisements to reach new customers. Without this data, you won’t know where to boost or improve campaigns.
There are several metrics to consider when measuring website marketing analytics:
Session Numbers
This is the number of visits a website receives across a specified period of time and is most useful for measuring how paid advertising campaigns perform within a set-time frame since implementation.
Channels
We previously touched on the importance of determining which channels traffic comes from. For example, if Facebook drives more traffic than Instagram, then logic dictates marketing spend should be adjusted accordingly.
Purchase Percentage
This is the number of users who visit a site and make a purchase, which is useful to project customer retention and average-order-value. Calculating average order value helps refine pricing strategy and marketing efforts.
Bounce Rate
Backlinko defines bounce rate as: “The percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the site.” A high bounce rate indicates users don’t stick around. It could be because web page loading time is too long, or SEO tactics were misleading. Either way, it demands fixing.
Time on Page
Not to be confused with bounce rate, time on the page refers to the average amount of time a user spends on a website page. Time on the page provides insight into whether a website is attracting the right traffic, and if its content is relevant to the intended target audience.
Digital Marketing Analytics Tools To Use
The tools used for digital marketing analytics vary in capability and price. Marketing teams typically employ a combination of software applications, aka “martech,” depending on the business’s needs and marketing strategies. Martech automates technical processes, measures the technical impact of marketing initiatives, and initiates efficient spending.
Below are the most trusted and credible digital analytics tools frequently used by leading marketers, including our experts at Comrade Web, to review marketing metrics.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics, the most famed web analytics marketing tool, offers a comprehensive overview of your website and marketing performance in the form of appealing charts, graphs, and spreadsheets. At its core, by aggregating data into robust and customizable reports, it reveals how users engage with your content, and the role different channels play.
It’s possible to connect Google Analytics with the search engine’s other publisher products, as well as other third-party CRM systems to centralize data. Google Analytics offers built-in technical support and delivers secure, accurate data from websites and apps.
Analytics also comes with built-in technical support and global infrastructure, which is why It’s widely used for good reason, as its technical abilities help businesses all over the world find and retain niche audiences.
It tracks the following marketing metrics, and more; users, sessions, pages per session, devices, average time no page, landing pages, and exit pages.
Google Search Console
Launched in 2018, Google Search Console helps maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google search results. In some cases, it can resolve server errors, site loading time, and security issues like hacking and malware. Marketers also use it to make sure site maintenance improvements are smooth and don’t upset search performance.
Google Search Console takes care of the technical part of your website by sending notifications when the search engine notices new errors. This maintains a steady stream of organic traffic to your website health while boosting organic performance.
With Google Search Console, you can view the following web analytics:
- Identify top-performing organic pages
- Check Core Web Vital scores
- Fix usability issues
- Review keywords visitors used to find your site
- Ensure all your web pages are properly indexed
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a popular content and search engine optimization tool. It’s used to analyze a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health. Incredibly, you can use the software to conduct keyword research on Google, YouTube, and even Amazon. A lot of SEO specialists use Ahrefs to research competitors and scan websites to detect SEO issues.
According to a review on Compare Camp, the main benefits of Ahrefs are its “large backlink checking solution, ability to dive deep into competitor search traffic, and quick identification of what types of content generate better income.” Ahref’s claim to fame is its strong and dependable backlink checker that offers information on any site URL’s background.
This software takes understanding engine optimization a step further by offering actionable data that, when used properly, generates traffic quickly and efficiently. According to the company, over 90% of content gets zero traffic from Google. If your digital marketing strategy lacks in this depart, then you’ll definitely want to include Ahrefs in your martech stack.
AWR
Advanced Web Ranking is the world’s longest-standing internet ranking tool. It produces visualizations of keyword permutations and their rankings on all major search engines mobile, desktop and local searches. Its customizable reports display current, previous, and best performance keywords, including the number of local monthly searches.
Advanced Web Ranking can also report on you and your competitor’s backlinks because it pulls authority metrics from Moz and Google Analytics. With AWR it’s possible to run updates on online marketing activities over time and compare them to improve link-building efforts. AWR is ideal for small to mid-sized businesses looking to get a foothold on digital analytics.
For those interested, AWR offers rank tracking, localization, white-label reports, analytics data, developer API, SEO audits, and social media analytics.
Moz
According to the website, Moz builds tools that “make SEO, inbound marketing, link building, and content marketing easy.” It’s an SEO company strictly focused on making successful SEO campaigns. Moz’s popular all-in-one SEO tool allows businesses to explore and monitor their website parameters using free and paid options.
Currently, it offers four versatile products:
- Moz Pro — A SEO toolset focused on keyword research, link building, website audits, and on-page optimization
- Moz Local — A local SEO and reputation management tool to help get more local customers and manage local listings
- Mozscape API — Software that uses data linking and intelligence metrics to help you improve your search rankings (more on this later!)
- Moz STAT — A tool for large-scale rank tracking and search analytics
SEMRush
SEMrush’s software also helps companies run SEO digital marketing campaigns. It’s a fantastic tool for seasoned marketers to turn digital analytics into actionable strategies and assists with SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, and Campaign Management.
However, SEMRush does require marketing know-how, as you will need to select which toolkits to use for your campaigns. While there’s no obligation to use a certain amount, it is important to select the relevant ones. To assist, the SEMRush Academy offers training resources to make it easier to understand where and how to optimize for stronger SEO performance.
SEMRush offers the most comprehensive SEO software on the market, with countless useful tools that extend beyond SEO. However, it can be expensive for small businesses and only analyzes Google’s search engine, limiting those with traffic from other engines.
How To Apply Analytics Data For Your Marketing Strategy To Improve
Marketers determined to understand their target audience, and strengthen their digital marketing strategy, need to know how to leverage marketing analytics. Regardless of the dozens of detailed ways and best marketing analytics practices, they should always be governed by the following questions:
- What do you want to find out?
- What marketing KPIs will you use to help?
- Where will your data come from?
- Which scales apply to different data sets?
- How will you ensure data quality?
- How will you analyze your data?
- What data visualizations will you use?
- What kind of software will you need?
Remember, data provides insights, but you have to ask the appropriate questions to ensure these insights point your business in the right direction. Alternatively, you could hire award-winning professionals to take care of your marketing analytics.
Conclusion
The only way digital marketing analytics works are when a company’s entire ethos is built upon a data-driven approach. Part of this entails getting everyone in the business to understand the value of data, which can be tricky if they’re not experts. Simply hoping and wishing seldom yield fruitful results.
If you require professional help improving your digital marketing analytics, then chat with us at Comrade Web Digital Marketing Agency. We’re a professional one-stop-shop for all your digital marketing needs. Give us a call at (312) 265-0580 or click here to fast-track your marketing success.
This article was originally published at Comradeweb.com, by author Stan Bogdashin. Original article >>
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