In the early stages of any marketing it is unlikely that you’ll have new customers or clients climbing over one another to buy your services or products. It does happen, but there are a lot of external factors that will cause this to happen. So how do you know what’s happening, is anyone reacting to your marketing, are there signs of return on your investment?
Understanding your collected data (or analytical data) is how you can see if your efforts are beginning to have an impact.
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What are Analytics
It is very important that we track how well your marketing is doing, fortunately with digital marketing there are many reliable ways we can analyse and real time data we can capture. Analysing the combination of signals and data will inform you and us about how things are going, inform us both of any changes we need to make and allow us to make data backed forecasts.
However, this is a subject that can easily be confusing and overwhelming. And interpreting the signals and data can seem like a ‘dark art’. Which is why we make use of not just Googles analytics but additional analytical tools. The combination of these help us both gather the worthwhile metrics not the vanity metrics, present the data in ways we can interpret what’s going (and you can understand it), what needs changing, and forecast what will happen next. To be honest, it takes a few years’ experience and understanding before any of tools can be setup and configured to bring out the right data that’s genuinely an insight into how you are performing.
Let’s demystify the subject, our goal here is to help you see why analytics matters, and how we use the knowledge we gain. Knowing what signals and data to capture, how to interpret and analyse this data, what to change and how to forecast what will happen next, is beyond the scope of this content. Sorry, but if that is what you seek – we can help
Shall we start with a definition According to Wikipedia:
- Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.
We might define it for our customers as:
- Analytics the gathering of data, looking at this data, figure out what is happening, figure out if we can improve things and then figure out what will happen next.
- Working with you, encouraging you to allow what we have learnt to inform decisions in the wider business.
The goal of this content is to help you see the wisdom, and the wider business benefits in that last sentence: Working with you, encouraging you to allow what we have learnt to inform decisions in the wider business. This leads nicely into why analytics matter.
Why are Analytics Important?
In the early days of a campaign
In the early stages of any marketing it is unlikely that you’ll have new customers or clients climbing over one another to buy your services or products. It does happen, but there are a lot of external factors that will cause this to happen. So how do you know what’s happening, is anyone reacting to your marketing, are there signs of return on your investment?
Understanding your collected data (or analytical data) is how you can see if your efforts are beginning to have an impact.
Knowing what was happening before you started your campaign allows you to see what is happening once your campaign begins; are your website visitors going up? is your bounce-rate going down? are more people clicking through from more external sources? do those clicking through match your target demographic? – just some of the signs that things are beginning to work, or things need changing.
In other words, with analytics you can measure how your sales funnels are really doing. This brings a number of benefits:
- Improve your conversion ratios. No more guessing, you can work out your ‘real’ conversion ratios as you track your prospects through your funnels.
- So, your sales forecasts become much more accurate, so accurate that you can confidently make important business decisions going forward.
- You can identify where your funnel may be leaking, losing, prospects
- You can plan how to fix these leaks, and measure the effectiveness of any changes.
The Ongoing Purpose
Going forward, rinse and repeat, analytics give you a way to assess your continued progress. Its an iterative process, plan, deploy measure, adjust…
Naturally, you will give greater weight to different metrics as you analyse progress as your campaign, or your business, develops and you reach your goals.
Finally, you will be gathering digital data from various sources allowing you to gain insights and understand:
- How prospects found you.
- How, and why, prospects become customers.
- How, and why, your customers stay.
- How, and why, your customers leave.
Google Analytics
You can’t talk about digital marketing analytics, without mentioning google analytics, the most popular digital analytics tool. Google Analytics is an automated digital analytics, measurement and reporting tool.
It is one of many tools, and data, google provide you with to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing, and help you understand;
- Where your website visitors come from
- What pages they visit
- How long they stay on those pages
- When they leave your website
The ROI from using google analytics is when you use the results to improve your digital marketing, content, seo, website and wider business decisions. It’s an impressive set of tools, working on a wide range of data and it’s free.
Google analytics 4
Currently, google analytics relies on ‘cookies’, small pieces of information stored in a visitors browser, this information helps google identify the visitors.
Concerns over security and privacy have resulted in a move against cookies with manufacturers and browser developers either blocking cookies altogether, or making it easy for us to block cookies. Hence, in the next version of google analytics, google analytics 4 google have developed methods of tracking behaviour without using cookies.
If you are new to something like Google Analytics you’ll undoubtably be lost in the maze of numbers, charts and graphs in there. You may not know which of those figures is important to your marketing success and what they are telling you to do next to improve your chances of success further.
Analytics plays a big part in your holistic marketing, help in your keyword selection, your content creation and your deployment.
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