What Your Digital Analytics Is Missing
There aren’t too many people out there that get excited by rows and columns of raw data, in particular, time-poor business owners and marketers. Pages and pages of numbers and percentages are uninspiring and can actually be demotivating to look at.
One of the true benefits of Digital Marketing, being able to attribute marketing activity to sales, has become cumbersome and time-consuming.
If this task was made not only easier but more valuable, you could spend your time doing what is intended of your position, which is to continuously improve and optimise your marketing efforts, growing your business by increasing the number of leads and sales over time. To achieve this, you need to rethink your Digital Analytics as there is a whole world of insights out there that you are missing out on.
What You Are Currently Measuring Is Not Digital Analytics
There is a common misconception that digital analytics = web analytics. The typical metrics associated with web analytics include traffic or user numbers, bounce rate, unique visitors and page load time which can be found on popular free tools such as Google Analytics.
Whilst measuring these factors provides valuable, top-level insight into the ongoing performance of your website, it doesn’t address the elusive topics such as proving the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing activities or gaining insight into your customer’s online journey.
Digital Analytics vs Web Analytics
Richer data is required for businesses to be able to comprehend the impact of their marketing campaigns on conversion rates, of which web analytics is only one piece of the puzzle. Remember that your online presence is very likely to have moved well beyond just your website. You more than likely have social media pages, digital advertising campaigns and email marketing initiatives just to name a few.
So how does your customer interact with you at each of these touchpoints, how does one channel influence another and most importantly how do each of these impacts your sales? Digital Analytics is the tool that incorporates all of your online channels to determine which online events influence whether leads become customers.
Track the Individuals Journey, not the Page View
Tracking the individual’s journey means you can find out where they came from to get to your site, what content they have viewed and how often they access that information.
You will find out valuable data such as:
- Are they regularly clicking on your emails?
- Are they reading your blogs?
- Have they come to you via Google or Facebook?
This type of rich data lets you understand trends amongst your consumers which will ultimately drive decisions about what content to produce to increase your conversion rates.
Tie Marketing Activity To Sales
The reason we struggle to tie marketing activity to sales is that:
- We don’t have solid goals and/or
- We don’t have the means to measure our success
There are two ways that this can be remedied to give your business the actionable insights you are looking for.
- Get the most bang for your buck out of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that when used smartly can offer so much more than just web analytics. By taking the time to set up goals you can track specific interactions for anything from form submissions to purchases and eBook downloads. You can also set a goal value for the specific task, so if you know the worth of a lead or download you can track this as well.
- Google Analytics can compare the different channels that your customers are converting on and tell you what channel led them to your site. Advanced insights come in the form of attribution paths and behaviour flows which show you the journey the customer has taken through the different channels prior to converting on your site.
- Invest in the latest Digital Analytics tools. By investing in a paid digital analytics solution you can gain the extra level of insight and accountability you are looking for by combining your Digital Analytics with your customer relationship management system (CRM). This enables you to track an individual’s behaviour with all of your online marketing channels and campaigns making it easy to tie marketing activity to sales. For example, it will give you the insight to understand if your blogs are gaining traffic but not converting, meaning you probably need to change your content to drive more sales activity.
How Digital Analytics Impacts Your Business
Digital Analytics exists to establish the true value of your online marketing activity, and give you actual insights into your customer’s behaviours so that you can improve and optimise your marketing performance. You don’t need to be spending your time wading through mountains of data from 5-10 different sources.
First, you need to take the time to get absolutely clear on what your business goals are and second, you should invest in the right all-in-one marketing tools to do the job and have these setup specifically to suit your business needs.
