Digital marketing analytics and data encompasses the procedures and technologies that enable businesses to determine the success of their marketing activities. This is achieved by measuring the performance of digital channels and their campaigns. If you are still a little unsure about the core basics of digital marketing we recommend reading our blog about what is digital marketing.
Data analytics in marketing uses decisive business metrics such as return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), cost per conversion, and conversion rate to discover how marketing channels are performing.
Digital marketing data is collected across all digital marketing channels and consolidated into a web analytics platform such as Google Analytics, allowing businesses to easily measure marketing results.
Understanding Digital Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics allows businesses to measure, manage, and analyse marketing performance to maximise effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). Marketing analytics allows businesses and marketers alike to become more efficient and minimise the risk of wasting budgets.
The Importance of Data for Digital Marketing
Collecting digital marketing data may seem like a chore, but it helps you understand your customers better. By building a thorough understanding of your customers you can provide them with the best possible experience, leading to higher conversion rates and more revenue for your business.
Let’s put this into perspective. If you own a restaurant, providing information about your organic produce could be very useful. If you find out that your customers cared about organic produce, you could change your menu to highlight the organic produce your restaurant provides. If you find out that your customers are less concerned about organic produce, then your restaurant could buy non-organic ingredients and lower your operating costs.
So, marketing insights allow you to develop your products and services. But, it also helps you sell them. For example, by determining which online channels your customers frequently use you can decide where to focus your online marketing efforts, enabling you to spend your budgets more efficiently.
Personalisation is also an important part of digital marketing. The more data you can collect on each of your customers, the better equipped you are to provide a personalised experience. From using their name email communications to sending tailored discounts and vouchers, an in-depth understanding of your customers can make a real difference.
The Importance of Digital Marketing Analysis
An analysis is more than just a buzzword. It’s one of the most effective tools to understand your customer journey and find out how well your marketing campaigns are performing. Analysing your digital marketing data is important to not only optimise your campaigns but also to help build your businesses overall marketing strategy by providing insights through data.
Digital Marketing Tools You Should Be Using
Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 is the best-in-class web analytics tool used by millions of websites across the globe. The tool allows you to track and understand customer behaviour, user experience, online content, device functionality, and more. Google Analytics provides you with the insight and data needed to better shape your digital strategies whilst discovering information about your customers which you probably never knew before. Google Analytics integrates with many other platforms, allowing data to be fed directly into this tool allow you to compare marketing channels and make informed decisions on how to better spend your budgets.
Google Search Console
Search Console will help you monitor website traffic and optimise the ranking of your website by making informed decisions about the appearance of your site’s search results. Search Console influences technical decisions for websites by providing insight into server errors, site load issues, and security issues. Within Search Console, you can analyse search query data reports which provide insight into what users are searching for when they see your website.
Google Ads
Google’s online advertising program allows businesses to create advertisements to reach audiences that have commercial intent in the products or services you offer. Google Ads runs on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, so you pay every time a user clicks on your ad. Within the Google Ads platform, you can gain insight into customer demographics, location, and device usage.
Facebook Business Manager
Facebook Business Manager gives business the ability to create and publish advertisements across Facebook and Instagram using defined audience targeting. It’s an affordable way for businesses to have a large reach. Using the data collected from Facebook Ads, businesses can find out what audience characteristics are most likely to engage and convert into customers. This data can be used to optimise advertising campaigns so that they become more relevant to your target audiences, providing a more personalised user experience and increasing conversion rates.
LinkedIn Campaign Manager
LinkedIn Campaign Manager allows businesses to reach their ideal customers on the worlds largest professional network. By targeting unique audiences, LinkedIn Ads engage prospects and generate leads. The data collected from this ad platform provides organisations with unique insights into the type of businesses or professionals most likely to engage with their service or product so that in the future, audience targeting can be more defined and the chance of users converting into customers is increased.
Why Invest in a CRM for Data Analytics
Another tool you should consider adding to your arsenal is a CRM system. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It tracks important data about your prospects and customers, allowing you to offer them a more personalised service.
A CRM helps you track leads and customers through the buyer’s journey and send them targeted communications to persuade them to convert. It can help you understand what kind of messaging speaks to your audience and detect patterns within your sales pipeline. Having access to all this detailed data will also help you make informed choices and strengthen your sales and marketing strategy with hard data.
There area number of good CRM systems out there, but our recommendation is the Hubspot CRM system. You can read more about the benefits of having a CRM system in place and why we recommend Hubspot in our blog post dedicated to CRM software.
3 Quick Steps to Analyse your Digital Marketing
Conducting digital marketing analysis is an important part of establishing a robust digital marketing strategy. Following this 3-step guide, your business will be able to understand how digital channels are performing and find areas of new opportunity to reach and engage your target audience.
1. Analyse Your Digital Marketing Channels
Digital marketing analytics provide businesses with a well-rounded look at the relationships held between different marketing channels. It’s good to know how each of your marketing channels is performing individually, but it’s great to harness the power of understanding how marketing channels perform together.
For example, if your business is using email marketing then your marketing analytics will not only be able to tell you how many people clicked through to your website, it will also be able to tell you what the user did upon reaching your website and if they converted into a lead or customer.
Analysing marketing channels gives businesses the ability to compare the impact of each marketing channel collectively.
2. Identify Activities That Lead To Conversions
Digital marketing analytics enables businesses to track how individual users are interacting with their various marketing activities and channels over time. How did a user reach your website? Did they come from Google? Facebook? Did that user become a subscriber to your newsletter? Did they read the latest blog you posted on your website?
Digital marketing analytics can tell you all of this information, and more. This valuable insight into user behaviour can help inform and direct your future marketing activities and help you understand which marketing activities are valuable at different stages of the user’s journey.
For example, you might find that many of your customer’s last point of interaction before they converted was through an email you sent. Having this data makes it possible to implement a more effective lead management process, enabling your business to prioritise activities by identifying which marketing mediums contributed to conversions.
3. Pinpoint Where Your Revenue Comes From
One of the most useful aspects of marketing analytics is the ability to attribute specific marketing activities to sales revenue. Yes, your blog may be an effective tool for generating leads but are those leads turning into paying customers?
Marketing analytics help you determine whether your marketing activities are contributing to an increase bottom line and can provide insight into what marketing channels are critical for driving sales. For example, a blog may be the most effective channel for generating customers but you may find social media is only an engagement mechanism, not a key driver of sales.
By measuring the relationship between marketing activities and the revenue they drive for your business you can begin to set goals to support your bottom line.
How Clear Click Can Help
At Clear Click, our experienced teams integrate strong digital marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes. All of our strategies start with an in-depth analysis of our clients’ analytics accounts so that we can identify and build an optimised strategy focusing on sustainable growth.
If you are looking for a digital marketing agency to partner and scale with, then contact us today!
