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A decision based on analytics is based on facts, not just opinions.
An important aspect of any marketing strategy is the analysis of marketing data. Analytics data tells you how your marketing strategy is performing. It also tells you exactly how and where to improve your marketing. In the digital marketing world, the analysis of the data gives you insights into the online channels where your consumers engage with your brand. This can enable you to make better business decisions. As an example, you have an active following on your social media page. But, when you look at the audience profile of the engaged people, you see that the age group is not your target audience. This enables you to rethink your post strategy, so that you attract more engagement from your intended audience.
Digital marketing analytics comprises of data across many channels. Before you start looking at the overall digital marketing strategy, it is important to understand each channel separately. The main channels are:
Website
Social media marketing
Email / SMS
Organic search
Social media platforms
In this post, I give you a brief overview of each channel and it's role in the marketing strategy. In the upcoming posts, I have covered each channel in detail and their key metrics. You can skip ahead to reading them by clicking on the heading links below.
If you have a website, then add some form of analytics on it. Many website building platforms already have built-in analytics. But, the information that they give could be limiting from the marketing perspective. In those cases, add a Google Analytics tracking code. It’s free and provides you with a lot of data to work with. The marketing data that is valuable to you is:
User count
Demographics of users
Source of traffic
Behaviour of users like what pages do they see, how much time do they spend on each page and what else do they do on the website
Search terms within your website
Knowing the profile and behaviour of the users on your website enables you to make improvements to it and attract the right audience.
When running a paid social media campaign, the quantity of results and the amount spent are the most common metrics that are being tracked. But as a business owner, you can drive improvements by including other metrics. These metrics are:
Impressions
Click-through-rate
Conversion rate
Cost-per-click
Cost-per-lead
Cost-per-conversion
It is important to understand what each metric stands for and how your business should be performing for it. While there are benchmarks for each, you are best placed to know what is acceptable to you. For instance, tracking cost-per-lead and cost-per-conversion over time will tell you whether your marketing campaigns are better or worse than before.
Communication related marketing like email and SMS campaign metrics are quite straightforward. They consist of:
List growth rate
Open rate
Click-through-rate
But when you look at this data from the strategic point of view, this data becomes more significant. It helps you decide why you send the communication, who you send it to and best time to send it. These drive sales of your product or service.
When people find your website by searching on a search engine platform and click on the non-paid result, then it is called 'organic search'. The important metrics for organic search are:
Keywords that your website ranks for
Average ranking in search results
Impressions
Knowing how your website is performing in search results can give you insights into content of the website and the intent of the user. Additionally, these metrics help you to analyse your SEO efforts.
Social media platforms are an important part of your marketing strategy. From increasing your brand awareness to driving sales, social media platforms play a huge role for your business. Many of the social media metrics are covered in website analytics. The exclusive metrics for social media are:
Follower demographics
Engagement rate
Reach
These metrics help you gauge the effectiveness of your social media page. Tracking the change in these metrics across platforms also help you to identify whether your followers are moving away from one platform to another.
Digital marketing analytics is a vast field with many metrics to consider. However, learning them one at a time, in bite-sized chunks is the best way to tackle them.
I'll look at website analytics in the next blog. Do come back to read about it.
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