As companies invest more in digital marketing than ever before, they also require meaningful insights to help them determine how well these campaigns are progressing. The study of digital marketing analytics is often the best solution to this challenge.
The benefits of digital marketing analytics include:
- The ability to boost Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
- Superior and deeper insights than basic vanity metrics
- Proving the ROI of marketing activities
- Delivering analytics related to your specific KPIs
- Helping you to understand customer behaviour on your digital platforms
- Using data in trial and error strategies to test out your campaigns
- Outsourcing when internal skills and experience are lacking
Skyrocketing interest in digital marketing analytics
90% of searchers haven’t fully determined how they feel about a brand before starting their search online, according to Status Labs.
This key piece of information reveals the importance of companies investing in their digital marketing campaigns to capture the interest of their target audience, but also the ability to interpret the success of their strategies through the use of digital marketing analytics.
As brands increase their spending on analytics between 75 to 100%, it’s worth understanding what this type of intelligence can do to help your marketing efforts, and exactly how organisations can use data to its full potential.
Digital marketing analytics can boost your CRO
Data analytics is the practice of measuring raw data using digital methods, such as algorithms or software programs, and then turning this data into valuable insights. These insights can help boost your marketing campaigns and allow you to make more strategic business decisions.
Data analysis can be utilised across multiple marketing platforms, including traditional methods. However, when applied to digital marketing, it is an essential way to help boost your conversion rate optimisation, or CRO.
In digital marketing, you will have a number of goals, which may be to increase your site visitors, get people to place a product order, sign up for a newsletter or simply like your Facebook page. When someone in your target audience completes this goal, you can measure this as a conversion. Your marketing team should make it an ongoing priority to increase these conversions in a process known as conversion rate optimisation.
Companies get side-tracked by vanity metrics
Unfortunately, many companies find it challenging to capture and measure the data that is most relevant to their marketing goals.
In fact, 42% of marketers reveal that ‘proving the ROI of our marketing activities’ is one of the most difficult tasks they face. Basic metrics are easily obtained using simple tracking or analytics tools which might tell you how many site visitors you have or what your bounce rate is. Some of these results might even seem to be quite impressive, but it’s important for companies to steer away from these vanity metrics and instead focus on data analytics that are related to specific goals and that are actionable.
So, if your attention is on increasing the conversion rate of your website newsletter sign-up, then a metric such as page views or Facebook likes isn’t relevant. The challenge when measuring digital marketing analytics is to set appropriate goals, then match these up with relevant metrics that measure your success.
Going deeper with rich data
The practice of determining your key performance indicators is the backbone of successful digital marketing analytics. KPIs are your measurable values which indicate how your campaign is performing.
So, if you want to test how effective your email marketing campaigns are, then your KPI might be to measure the click-through rate of a link within the email you send out. This is the type of rich, granular data that companies should be analysing, as well as determining the engagement level of their target audience.
Understanding user behaviour
If you’re posting plenty of content on your blog, YouTube channels or social pages, then page views or even likes aren’t necessarily the best indicator of whether your consumers are fully engaged with your content.
Instead, you might track whether site visitors are commenting on your blog posts or choosing to share your social posts. Where do your visitors go once they’ve watched one of your videos for example? Do they click on one of your sales pages, or visit a competitor site instead?
Rich data can be used to get a firm grasp of user behaviour and understand the customer journey through the sales funnel on your digital platforms. Is there an obvious point of failure where you lose their interest? This is the type of information that is crucial to the success of your digital marketing campaigns and that companies need to know.
The beauty of digital marketing analytics is that you can apply a trial and error strategy by testing out different campaigns to determine which provides you with the best rewards.
Getting the balance right
Data science is a fascinating and useful subject, but it can be quite overwhelming. We know that predictive analytics and historic data can help us to generate a better ROI. However, key performance indicators should help your marketing teams to gain focus, and if you’re measuring too many of them then this focus can become unclear.
In fact, an excess of data can actually harm your marketing strategy if you’re not using it correctly. Some marketers are known to suffer from ‘InfoObesity’, a saturation of data which is impossible to consume and make sense of. This has happened because our increased ability to collect data has not been matched by our competence in managing or filtering the information adequately.
The key point is to obtain the right data, and understand how to use the results to take positive action to boost your CRO. There’s no set number of KPIs that you should monitor, but broadly speaking you might choose approximately 7-10 of them so that you’re able to fully concentrate on their success or progress without becoming overwhelmed by meaningless output.
Investing in data analytics talent
Another consideration is that your organisation needs to have access to the right talent in order to make sense of rich data and turn it into valuable insights. The demand for data analytics is expected to grow more rapidly than any other digital skill over the next five years, but the shortage of data analysts available holds back some marketing departments who have been trying to do too much internally.
Unfortunately, marketers in 2018 reported that they were only able to tap into 61% of the functionality of their martech portfolios due to a lack of resources and skills. These marketers will be missing out on 39% of the value that rich data analytics can provide for their organisation.
With Gartner reporting that data analytics tops the priority list of future investments, it’s time for companies to take action and budget accordingly to ensure that they capitalise on the efforts of their digital marketing teams and are able to boost their CRO effectively.
By outsourcing your digital marketing analytics to us, our Conversion Rate Optimisation service will provide you with the same techniques that are used by multinational businesses. We will perform a detailed analysis of your digital marketing campaigns and often just a few small adjustments are required to transform your conversion rates. If you want more leads without spending more on traffic, then we can help you. Get in touch today!