One of the greatest challenges facing businesses today is measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing. One way to overcome this challenge is the use of digital marketing analytics. Here is what digital marketing analytics entails and why it matters to your business.
When they hear ‘digital analytics’, most marketers automatically think of metrics associated with web analytics tool such as traffic, bounce rate, unique visitors, etc. While web analytics can provide you with considerable insight and data into your website’s performance, you need much richer data to understand the impact of your marketing campaigns on conversion rates and a customer’s journey through the marketing and sales funnel.
Enter digital marketing analytics—a much more comprehensive view of what’s working and what it isn’t in relation to your marketing strategy.
Understanding Digital Marketing Analytics
In digital marketing, you can measure almost everything. While you can measure virtually everything in digital marketing, you should avoid doing that. Ideally, your digital analytics campaign should focus on three things:
- Capturing data
- Analyzing data
- Interpreting data (and repeat)
However, this raises some important questions: what data should you analyze? How should you measure it? And, what tools should you use? All this and more will be revealed next.
What to Measure?
This will vary according to the business. Start by contemplating your business goals. Make sure that your online strategy is aligned in some way with your business (and team) goals. For example, if your main business goal is increasing revenue, then your digital marketing efforts should help you increase this revenue.
Now the above doesn’t mean that all your focus should be on selling. Instead, it means that you should look at metrics like engagement, audience growth and reach, and the consider how all this can translate into revenue. A mistake that many businesses make is not choosing KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) aligned with their business goals, which makes it difficult for them to measure success or identify any tangible opportunities for improvement.
So, the first thing that you need to enable successful analytics is identify what metrics matter to you the most to achieve your business goal. Next, look at all the online platforms you are currently on. List all the metrics you need to achieve your business goals and then note how to get those metrics for each network.
Now that you have your list of metrics for each social network, look at them closely and choose which ones are your business drivers. Some of them may be your primary metrics such as clickthroughs to your website from the different online platforms, while others may be secondary metrics such as volume of engagement. The primary metrics will be your actual KPIs.
While it is good to focus on the primary metrics or what matters to you the most, you should be aware of the remaining metrics and where/how to get them if you need to revisit your strategy at a later stage.
How to Measure?
The analytics world is vast and as such, there are multiple types of analytics covering different digital marketing aspects. While it is possible to measure virtually all digital marketing data, not all of it comes for free. In fact, organizations cannot ensure the success of their digital analytics due to budget constraints. For this reason, you need to find which analytics tools matters most to your business and is crucial for measuring your KPIs. There are many different types of analytics tools that you need to know about and we will list many of them here.
The Digital Analytics Tools
The tools for measuring digital marketing metrics or KPIs are categorized into four main types: web analytics tools, SEO analytics tools, social media measuring tools, and social media listening tools. Here, we are going to list some important tools in each category and what they can help achieve.
Web Analytics Tools
You need to measure the performance of your website that goes beyond visitors, visits and pageview and the following analytics tools can help you do that:
Google Analytics
One of the most comprehensive tools in the market, Google analytics is a powerful marketing analytics solution for companies of all shapes and sizes that can help improve KPIs such as engagement and click throughs.
Adobe Marketing Cloud
An integrated cloud based marketing tool, adobe marketing cloud can provide you with a 360-degree view of your website’s performance.
Webtrends
Specializing in web and mobile analytics, webtrends has social analytics as an integration.
SEO Analytics Tools
SEO analytics tools can help you understand we search performance for your own website. Following are some popular SEO analytics tools.
Google Analytics
You can access various SEO reports by linking your Google Webmaster tools account to your Google Analytics account.
HubSpot
Integrated into all your content tools, HubSpot’s SEO tool can easily optimize your entire site to allow you to identify SEO errors on your pages immediately.
Moz
This tool show how your social presence impacts on your SEO over time
Social Media Measuring Tools
These tools measure the performance of your social activities and include the following:
Hootsuite
A social powerhouse, Hootsuite provides a solid analytics solution and a strong management solution that allows you to see how you’re performing in real-time on social media
Adobe Social
A comprehensive solution, adobe social enables social media measurement, listening and publishing.
Simply Measured
A full-featured social analytics tool, simply measured offers in-depth measurement across owned and earned social media.
Social Media Listening Tools
Based on keywords and trends, these tools allow you to monitor online conversations. Following are some popular social media listening tools:
BrandWatch
With this tool, you can monitor, analyses and utilize online conversations about your brand, competitors and topics of interest from across the world, in twenty-seven languages.
Synthesio
This tool allows you to listen, analyze and engage in real-time within one platform, in fifty languages and across two hundred countries.
There you have it—why digital marketing analytics matter to your business and the tools that can enable it. For more information on the topic, get in touch with us today!
by Bobby J Davidson
I love our companies and we love what we do. For more information on the Davidson Family of Companies, visit www.bobbydavidson.com/about. Sign up for my Newsletter at the bottom of this page.