Whether it’s inbound marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, or any other channel, success hinges largely upon data-driven decision-making. Without objective data, it’s nearly impossible to know what’s working and what’s not.
But how do you gather this data to optimize your marketing efforts?
One technology offers everything you need — digital marketing analytics.
What Is Digital Marketing Analytics?
It’s the process of gathering data from different sources across your digital marketing campaign, analyzing it, and using the data to gain valuable insights to improve your campaign.
At its core, digital marketing analytics helps you objectively understand how customers interact with your marketing content so you can make better decisions moving forward. Rather than guessing what the customer experience is like, digital marketing analytics allows you to quantify virtually everything.
That way every decision you make is based on solid customer data so you can A) refine the customer experience and B) increase conversions.
Further, digital marketing analysis should ensure you don’t waste time and money on a marketing strategy that isn’t carrying its weight. If there’s a clear weak link (as there often is), you can either make the necessary changes to improve in that area or eliminate it altogether.
In short, digital marketing analytics is integral to understanding customer behavior, boosting ROI, and making your overall campaign as efficient as possible.
How Digital Marketing Analytics Works
The process of using digital marketing analytics involves this sequence of steps.
Choose Data Analytics Tools
First, you need to find the right platform to generate your digital marketing data. This could be a basic tool like Google Analytics to produce simple web analytics data or something more advanced like Woopra, which offers end-to-end insights on user behavior.
Identify Goals and Objectives
What exactly are you looking to accomplish on the macro and micro level with your marketing efforts?
Identify Your KPIs
These are the core metrics you’ll analyze to determine campaign performance. Some examples can include website traffic, organic traffic, conversion rate, and cost-per-lead.
Select Digital Marketing Channels to Analyze
These are the specific sources you’ll want to plug into your data analytics platform and can include your website, content marketing campaign, social media channels, Google Ad data, and email.
Gather Marketing Data
This is the actual process of collecting big data and populating your digital marketing analytics dashboard with it.
Analyze the Data
Here’s where you use analysis to make sense of your data to identify patterns and trends to learn more about your audience and gain actionable insight. Ideally, the platform you use will make analysis simple and intuitive because needless complexity is one of the biggest barriers to marketing analytics.
Implement Your Findings
Finally, you put your findings into practice by making the right adjustments to optimize your digital marketing campaign.
From there, it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating and making ongoing adjustments as you continue to learn more about each marketing metric within your campaign.
Important Metrics Under Digital Marketing Analytics
Although each online marketing campaign will vary and may focus on different areas, here are some of the most important types of marketing analytics metrics used across the board.
Website Marketing Analytics Metrics
- Pageviews - The number of visitors to your website over a given period
- Average session duration - The average length of time visitors spend on your site
- Pages per session - The average number of web pages visitors look at
- Bounce rate - The percentage of visitors that leave your website after only viewing one page
- Traffic sources - The sources that point visitors to your website
- Click-through-rate - The number of clicks an ad or post receives divided by how many times it’s shown
- Conversion rate - The number of conversions you get divided by the number of visitors
- Devices - The specific devices your visitors access your website on (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, etc.)
- Exit pages - The final pages visitors view before leaving your site
Email Marketing Metrics
- Open rate - Perhaps the most fundamental of all metrics, this looks at the percentage of subscribers that open an email
- Click-through-rate - The number of subscribers that click on a link within an email
- Conversion rate - The number of subscribers that click on a link within an email and complete an action like making a purchase or deciding to request information
- Unsubscribe rate - The percentage of subscribers that unsubscribe from your list over a given period
- List growth rate - The overall level of growth of your email list
- Email marketing ROI - The overall return on investment you see to determine how profitable your email marketing campaign is with data analytics
Social Media Marketing Metrics
- Content impressions - The number of times your social media content is viewed (this can include a particular post or your social media profile)
- Reach - The number of individual people that are exposed to your social media content over a period
- Engagement rate - The number of engagements your social media content receives (likes, comments, shares, etc.)
- Click-through-rate - The percentage of social media users that take action by clicking on a link included in your content
- Conversion rate - The number of times your content results in a conversion, such as a download, subscription, or sale
- Cost-per-click - How much it costs on average for someone to click on a social media ad
- Follower growth - The overall trajectory of your social media followers over time
- Virality rate - The rate at which your content spreads exponentially or “goes viral”
E-Commerce Metrics
- Store traffic - The number of shoppers that visit your e-commerce store
- Average session duration - How long on average each shopper spends on your e-commerce store
- Pages per session - The average number of pages shoppers view
- Bounce rate - The percentage of shoppers that leave after only viewing one page of your e-commerce store
- Conversion rate - The percentage of shoppers that result in a sale
- Average order value - The average amount of money spent per purchase
- Shopping cart abandonment rate - The percentage of shoppers that leave one or more products in their shopping cart without completing a purchase
- Repeat purchase rate - The number of customers that return to buy again
- Customer lifetime value - The total amount of revenue generated from a customer over time
Common Digital Marketing Analytics Tools
For many small business or international business owners with basic needs, a straightforward platform like Google Analytics is sufficient for generating data for web analytics and predictive analytics.
While this won’t necessarily tell you the whole story, it should give you a fairly clear idea of how successful your digital marketing campaign is and what you need to work on.
However, for businesses that need something a bit more robust and personalized, digital analytics tools like Adobe Analytics and Woopra, which utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning, are a popular choice.
More holistic, these digital analytics go more granular than basic web analytics and offer big-picture views on each digital marketing activity. They really pull the hood back on customer behavior, giving you a level of highly detailed insight.
Woopra, in particular, focuses on visualizing the customer journey end-to-end so you can learn more about each marketing channel and fully refine every aspect of your campaign.
Conclusion
Just like any other area of business, succeeding in digital marketing requires data-driven decision-making.
By knowing what marketing analytics is, which digital analytics tools to use, and which KPIs to focus on, you can refine your digital marketing strategy and customer service to get the absolute most from your investment.
If you’re interested in experimenting with Woopra and want to see the value it can add to your business analytics tech stack, you can get a free trial today.
