27 Apr Analytics… The Way To Effective Digital Marketing
The prospect of viewing any analytics software for the first time might be daunting at first. You might be presented with a stream of data that you cannot make sense of. You may begin to question how all this confusing information relates to your business and how do you use it effectively to improve you brand. This however does not have to be a nail biting, intimidating exercise.
Importance of analytics
Unlike conventional marketing digital marketing gives you direct information to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, this will enable you to see how effective the campaign is. This helps you to adjust the activities as you assess what effective and what not. It is crucial that you ascertain if your current digital marketing endeavours are in fact working and benefiting your business. If you neglect to do this, you might be throwing money down the drain on services that are not effect.
In order to avert falling victim to this, there are a few factors you need to keep in mind to aid you in assessing your digital strategy. The first thing to consider is what you what to measure.
What to consider
Visitors
The number of clicks on your advert and number visits to your website is paramount in lead generation. You don’t have to be a digital marketing maven to evaluate what is important when it relates to the visitors. You need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Are audiences actually viewing the ad you have set up?
- How many people are viewing it?
- Do people click on the advert when they see it online?
This information will help you refine your advertising campaign. If people are looking at your ad but they do not click on it, it might be an indication that the message on the advert is not captivating enough to get the target audience to engage. There may be other factors you have not considered that might be the reason you are not getting the desirable number of clicks.
Audience activity
What do people do when the visit your site? Which content to they spend the most time viewing? This helps to give more emphasis to what clients need more than just we think client what to see this gives you that platform to make real time adjustment made on real time data.
Likelihood of conversion
It is important you set up clear call to actions that will help direct a potential customer to your desired result. Without a clear nonintrusive call to action, people will see your advert but not know what step to take next. This may drive audiences to consider other brands who have laid-out a better plan to give them direction.
Conversion refers to the action you want an audience or consumer to take. A conversion result would normally mean there is some form of revenue received by your website – this includes sign-ups to your newsletter or products purchased through the site.
Rob Stokes outlines six steps you can take to optimise your conversion rate.
- Gather data – You need to collect data about your website to ensure that you make informed decision regarding what needs to be tested and how to go about this. There numerous sources available for this. Deciding on which sources (web analytics data, user data, or customer service) to use should be based on the nature of your specific site and the type of business – what is the one thing you want people to do when they visit your website.
- Analyse – After you have collected all the data you need; you have to analyse it shrewdly before you can design tests. At this stage, you should be asking the following questions:
- Who is coming to your site, and why?
- What are they doing while they are on the website?
- What should they be doing on the website?
- Repair what’s broken – You may have diagnosed some issues regarding visitors’ activities on your website during the analysis stage. This should be fixed before taking the next step. Your site should attract the relevant traffic. If you have noted that this is not the case for example, it should be addressed (fixed).
- Design the tests – By this stage, you should already have an informed idea of which areas on your website need to be tested. Before you start testing, determine the starting point (also known as the null hypothesis), the alternatives and the expected result.
- Run tests – Implement the tracking code required for testing and also ensure that you include the tracking code on your conversion page. Before you take your test live, confirm that the tracking code does not conflict with other codes on your website.
- Report & repeat – As soon as you get a result, report on it. Revisit your null hypothesis and compare if they result are what you expected. Your report should include – why you got the result you expected, or why you didn’t. Lastly, you can now implement the best performing solution and plan for you next test.
Digital advertising gives you a platform to measure your digital marketing activity and refine your marketing strategy accordingly. Analytics gives you real time information about the customer and how they react to your advertising.