Digital Analytics drives your online marketing performance!
“Digital analytics” sounds quite intimidating, right?! Two words to avoid like the plague. Sorry to say, these are two words you must embrace if you want to ensure you bring the right customers to your door. That been said, let’s break it down and learn what digital analytics is all about.
WHAT IS DIGITAL ANALYTICS?
Digital analytics is the stats you collect online which tell you about your website and how it is faring. It also tells you how your competitors are doing. In other words these stats or data can help you to improve the user experience on your website in order to meet your marketing objectives. More importantly, you get to stay ahead of your competitors. Understanding your data will ultimately demonstrate how your online marketing activities are a great ROI.
DID YOU KNOW?
- There are more than 3 billion internet users in the world
- There are over 900-million websites globally
- In 2016, 56% of all internet traffic were bots, spammers and scrapers, only 44% of the traffic were actual humans
- There are 1.2-trillion Google searches a year which makes up 78% of all search engine usage
- In 2016, more than 1 billion people purchased a product online
And it’s important to note that all of the above stats are growing as each day passes
Here’s the interesting thing though, many businesses that are online still don’t benefit from this. Here is why?
- They don’t have a proper digital analytics strategy
- They don’t know what key performance indicators (KPIs) measure success or failure
- Most can’t tell you their site speed on different devices, e.g. mobile
- They can’t differentiate between spam traffic and real traffic
- They don’t monitor usability of their sites and which areas to improve
- And the most tragic of all, most don’t have an analytics account
It’s never too late or too early to measure your business’s success or failure online, and start improving your marketing drive.
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN MEASURE YOUR DATA USING ANALYTICS
The great news is most analytics tools are free, like Google analytics, Bing Webmaster, and others.
We’d like to show you how to understand the quality and quantity of your data by using the Google analytics tool and following these 5 simple guidelines:
1.Draft internal objectives and the steps leading to their success, they could be:
- Increase newsletter subscriptions by 60% in two months
- Sell 16% more tickets online for an event compared to previous month
- Increase online orders for a specific product by 40% over a three-week period
- Increase your shop’s walk-in visitors by 10% in a month
- Get more queries for your services or products leading to more sells
You start with a plan and a goal then open an analytics account
2. Choose the best suited analytics tool for your business, in this case we chose Google analytics. Here’s how to choose the right tool:
- Can it measure your KPIs and steps leading to the acquisition?
- Do you understand the terms used to describe how you analyse?
- Can you configure it to show your specific requests?
If you answered yes to all of the above, you are on the right track
3. Now it’s time to configure the analytics for more accurate reporting. Here’s how:
- Implement the tracking code on your website to start measuring
- Create an additional view/s that excludes internal traffic
- Monitor spam referrals and exclude all known and coming spammers
- Create a view/s for specific pages that are important to your business success – you can have a maximum of 20 views per account, and these could be product pages, services pages, blog/articles pages and much more
- Configure your analytics tool to collect off and on-site campaign traffic stats
All your configurations are guided by KPIs you drafted above
4. Event tracking
In Google analytics this is when you insert an extra code to track things like your downloads, calls, videos views and button clicks on your CTAs (Calls to Action). Event tracking lets you measure the things on your website that don’t appear on your analytics dashboard. Event tracking is used often to track activity on mobile apps.
5. It’s vital to ‘Enable Remarketing’ on your admin because it shows you lost leads which you can pursue and win back.
Now that you have completed these steps you will be able to see what pages of your site have high bounce rates and begin to improve on them.
You will finally have a grasp on:
- which CTA buttons are not being clicked on and change their placement, colour or both;
- what geographical locations are performing well and improve your offerings to make them your brand ambassadors;
- which devices are performing well;
- which marketing channel is bringing the most traffic;
- which queries or keywords bring traffic to your site
Remember, this all starts with a clear goal, quality content and a great website!
Do you feel you still need some help after reading this article? Just leave a comment below and we will get back to you in no time or contact us on 010 007 4795 or Email [email protected] for a FREE consultation.