Why you should understand your analytics

It may seem as though digital marketers may have an obsession with analytics.  But is it right to say that analytics has become an obsession or is it very much a necessity when it comes to SEO and digital marketing?

There’s a good reason why digital marketers make analytics a priority and it’s simple – digital marketing wouldn’t be sustainable without it.

Big data isn’t just a buzz word.  Collecting, understanding and using digital marketing analytical data enables digital marketers to be successful in this highly competitive environment.

So, we’ve established that analytics are important – but why?

Digital marketing is an expanding world of effective marketing and has many financial and other business benefits.  Failing to properly analyse your analytics can result in skewed data, which means fully understanding what works in your digital marketing campaigns and what doesn’t is impossible.

It’s crucial for any business who is involved in digital marketing to complete and SEO course so that you’ll not only understand your analytics, but your business will benefit too.

Why analytics can sometimes be an after-thought

 It’s all very exciting creating a digital marketing campaign.  To see your creation go ‘live’ online is an absolute thrill and something you can be very proud of.  However, it’s vitally important that once your online ad or post has run its course that you fully understand its analytics.

After the exciting part of starting your digital marketing campaign, you must remember that it’s all about data, which means analytics.  Multi-national companies spend millions on understanding their analytics and collecting data – and for a good reason.  Disregarding valuable analytical data could well be detrimental to your digital marketing success. So, without a doubt, valuable information is at stake

However, many digital marketers see analytics as an after-thought and is often the very last thing on their minds when starting a digital marketing campaign.  Such an after-thought can certainly have a negative effect on your next approach.  Many digital marketers are consumed with creating, sharing and marketing of an online ad or post, yet fail dismally when it comes to learning how their marketing faired by failing to understand their analytics.

Analytics objectives

There are often quite a few objectives when it comes to understanding your analytics and this should be seen as a long term investment in both time and money.

Here are some reasons why it’s important to understand your analytics in order to ensure the success of your digital marketing campaigns:

• Understand your visitors – It’s important to know where your visitors come from and to understand the demographics of your online interactions. Understanding where your visitors are from helps to formulate an action plan and understand their needs. This data can help you decide which type of visitor to invest time and resources in, for example, mobile users or desktop.
• Know your audience – To be successful online, you’ll have to understand what your audience is looking for and how they search online.
• SEO benefits – It can be quite a task to find the link between your social media engagement and increased SEO benefits, however, recent studies have found that where there is high social media engagement there is definitely increased traffic to the website – which is the ultimate goal in all digital marketing strategies.
• Compare your competition – By studying your analytics you can compare website traffic with your competitors and actually see how many visits your competitor is getting, now this is valuable information.
• Analysing campaign effectiveness – All digital marketing campaigns cost time and money, so it stands to reason that return on investment must be measured and understanding your analytics is a great way of measuring a campaign’s effectiveness.
• Conversion rate – Although direct sales are never guaranteed through digital marketing, it helps to increase your conversion rate by analysing your data. Having a greater insight into the effectiveness of your campaigns through analytics offers you a better chance of an increase in future conversion rates.

What are the most important objectives of conducting digital marketing analytics?

It’s safe to say that there are many real challenges to face when it comes to analysing your marketing data and when facing these realities, you may feel a little dazed.  First of all, it’s vital that you completely understand your digital marketing objectives in order to accurately measure their results against your goals.  Understanding the role of marketing analytics is important, in this case, the why is just as important as the what.

Always keep in mind that data isn’t just about numbers and results.  Effectively analysing this data can immediately turn numbers into an actionable plan.

Here are some important reasons why it’s so important to make sure your business carries out effective digital marketing analytics.

• Fix the useful KPIs – Set the KPI’s on your metrics. Set out the effect a result of a certain metric would have on the business.  For example, does a higher rate of clicks result in a successful conversion rate?
• Have a strategy – Remember to have a marketing analytics strategy firmly in place before you start analysing the data. The results are not the key, what the results mean for your business’ performance is where a solid strategy will pay off.
• Hands-on approach – The success or failure of digital marketing affects the entire business, so for this reason, it’s important to have an all-inclusive buy-in from company directors and all involved have a hands-on approach.
• Define your target – Make sure you understand and set your targets at the get-go of your digital marketing campaign. Realise and then define your goal so that you have clear targets in place.
• Create a data-driven culture – It’s key to instil a culture of data analytics within your business. Employees that are comfortable working with data regularly are more likely to achieve your marketing analytics goals.
• Make analytical decisions – Data-driven decisions are vital to the successful management of marketing analytics. Decisions within the business must keep the results of marketing analytics data top of mind.
• Define your metrics – With so much data available these days it’s often a challenge to decide and define what data matters. Not all data is useful.  Define your metrics first.

Conclusion

In our digital world, the data we collect from our digital marketing campaigns, such as an email campaign, online interactions and website visits is a necessity to move forward in the right direction with your next digital marketing campaign.

Measuring the metrics and gaining valuable insights helps you understand your analytics and measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns.

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