Today customer expectations are higher than ever before. Customers want their needs met in time together with a personalized experience when consuming your product or service. Thus, effective digital marketing focuses on the customer journey right from awareness, interest, evaluation, intent, purchase, to loyalty. However, challenges arise when an organization or marketer has to measure the effectiveness of its digital marketing strategy. This is where digital marketing analytics comes in.
Data plays a critical role during
digital marketing as marketers rely on insights from data to formulate business
goals and marketing strategies. Using digital marketing analytics, marketers
can develop marketing strategies that will not only be aimed at meeting customers’
specific needs but also make it possible to measure the return on investment
for a digital marketing strategy.
Web analytics has become
increasingly ubiquitous in the digital marketing field even though it is only a
small part of digital marketing analytics. A practical digital marketing analytics training equips professionals to develop an effective digital
marketing analytics strategy with well-structured goals and their expected
outcomes based on standard industry metrics.
What is digital marketing analytics?
Digital marketing analytics is a
great tool for measuring the effectiveness of a digital marketing strategy. It
encompasses the tools, technologies, and processes that digital marketers use
to collect, analyze, visualize, and draw insight from marketing data for
decision-making. This data is drawn from digital platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn on which a brand has a presence as well as
other channels that generate marketing data such as email, organic search, and
search ads.
As mentioned above, the most
relevant data for a digital marketing analytics strategy is one that is focused
on the customer journey as it will help marketers understand customer behavior
in regards to their interests, preferences, intent, and more. Information
obtained from this data is useful for identifying and fixing deficiencies in
particular channels of their marketing mix.
Digital marketing analytics is important
for the following reasons:
●
Analytics provides data-driven insights that help marketers
understand customer behavior and define target audiences.
●
Helps marketers to measure the effectiveness of their
marketing strategies and measure the overall ROI of the strategy.
●
Helps marketers assess and select the appropriate metrics to
use in tracking the performance of their marketing initiatives for the best
possible business outcome.
●
Provides the insights, hidden patterns, and opportunities
that inform marketers’ future marketing decisions
●
Marketing analytics tools help collect data efficiently from
diverse channels and provide a single view of the data for effective analysis
and strategy.
● Marketing analytics also helps a
business to understand its competition based on market research and competitive
analysis to adjust its strategies accordingly.
Metrics of Digital Marketing Analytics
Digital marketing analytics measures
the performance of a business’ marketing strategies based on certain
statistical metrics. These are:
●
Traffic. Traffic refers to the total number
of visits to a website at a given time. This can be measured by the source of
traffic including channel and device as well as other metrics like time on
page, interactions per visit, bounce rate, and the ratio of new to returning
traffic.
●
Conversions. These refer to the actions
expected from people who interact with your site, call-to-action, or marketing
campaign. Conversions could mean email marketing opt-in, filling out a form,
making a purchase from the site, or downloading which gets a visitor into the
system. This can be measured by metrics such as Call-To-Action
Click-Through-Rate, submissions, conversion rate, leads to clove ratio,
shopping cart abandonment rate, and pop-up conversations.
●
Engagement. This is the number of likes,
shares, comments on a social media post and can turn into leads or qualified
audiences. Engagement can be tracked by metrics like total followers or
subscribers, audience growth rate, engagement rate, total shares, post reach,
share of social voice, and approval rate.
●
Click-through rate (CTR). Using Paid ads is a good way of
building a brand’s online presence. CTR refers to the number of times an ad is
clicked versus the number of times it is shown.
● Site load speed. While a site load speed may not necessarily indicate a
fast user experience, it is an important aspect of it. To improve your site
load speed check on your image sizes, content distribution networks (CDNs), and
site code.
Mistakes to avoid in Digital Marketing Analytics
There is much to benefit from
digital marketing analytics just as digital marketing counts significantly in
building a brand. Yet, some avoidable mistakes that businesses and/or marketers
make can be costly and not yield results.
1. Lack of a clear strategy
A strategy is broken down into smaller achievable goals each
of which is tied to an expected outcome. Without a clear strategy it's a cinch
there will be no clear goals which is bound to result in marketing analytics
that waste resources.
Tip: A clear strategy should define the
target audience, set clear reasonable goals and targets, use metrics that are
based on business objectives, and have a clear measure for keeping track of the
progress.
2. Unfiltered data
Marketing analytics data comes in a wide variety of formats
and is sourced from multiple channels. The aim of filtering data is to ensure
data quality, validity, security, and
accurate interpretations. Poor data collection is more often than not the cause
of inaccurate data analytics and interpretations and ultimately the wrong
course of action.
Tip. Standardize data collection across
all channels.
3. Lack of a measurement plan
A measurement plan translates business objectives into
metrics and dimensions that can be used to track and measure the performance of
a digital marketing strategy. It defines what a successful marketing campaign
is and helps determine the metrics to be used in implementing a strategy.
Without a measurement plan, it may be difficult to select the right metrics for
your marketing campaigns. Remember that it is from these metrics that data for
analytics is collected.
Tip: Segment your KPI based on source to see how individual
metrics impact the performance of your marketing campaigns.
4.
Wrong tools and metrics
Focusing on the wrong metrics can be
misleading and cause you to invest resources in the wrong marketing campaign.
Also, using analytics tools that are selective or biased to some channels can
prove ineffective. Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and Instagram
analytics apps are great analytics tools but biased to the respective channels.
Without the right approach, one may succeed at driving traffic but not at
conversions.
Tip: It is important to base your metrics on the objectives of
your marketing initiatives and use analytics tools and technologies that take
into account all marketing channels to effectively measure the performance and
analyze the outcome of your campaigns.
5.
Failing to segment an audience
The right metrics will help segment
your audience to identify the segment that brings the highest lifetime value
(LTV). Most successful marketers will focus their efforts on this particular
segment.
Tip: Focus on LTV and optimize the customer acquisition cost to
get a good return on investment (ROI).
6.
Skipping data evaluation
A measurement plan helps select the
right metrics to use for data collection. Even with a standardized data
collection process, data evaluating is an equally important process as it helps
you better understand the information and insights drawn from the data for
decision-making and for creating effective marketing campaigns. Data evaluation
encompasses data analysis, visualization, and interpretation.
Tip: marketing data should be comprehensive comprising web
analytics, social media data, email marketing data, and lead generation data to
provide richer insights.
7.
Overlooking competition
There is a high chance that several
other businesses are selling the same products or offering the same services as
your business. As competition becomes tougher each day, we cannot afford to
ignore the competition.
Tip: Benchmarking and competitive analysis provide a way of
selecting the right competitors and industry leaders, researching their
strategies, identifying the relevant KPIs, and structuring marketing campaigns
that help the business stay ahead of the competition.
Wrapping up
To successfully analyze the
marketing campaigns, marketers need to select the right stack of marketing
tools, technologies, and processes. Digital tools that consolidate multiple
marketing channels for analytics are most preferred for informed decision-making.
As consumers demand personalized experiences their expectations keep evolving
which requires that marketers optimize their budgets and avoid these analytics
mistakes to get the most from their marketing analytics strategies.
