Question: How do you compete when it comes to user experience in 2023? This is a question that’s probably been on your mind as you start to plan your budgets and activities.
2022 was a tricky year for many businesses to navigate. Take a looming recession, post-Covid workplace changes and inflation just to name a few challenges. But with this new landscape comes new opportunities for businesses to start to understand their customers, find ways to stand out from the competition and most importantly, increase profits.
That’s where digital analytics comes in! Digital analytics have become more and more an essential part of your business. They play a key role in growth and sustaining growth, an integral part in meeting the challenges of an evolving measurement landscape and gain better insights into predicting outcomes and enhancing your overall marketing performance.
Digital analytics provide you with the tools to make smart and calculated decisions, instead of relying on assumptions. Let’s dive in and see how they can benefit your business and more importantly how to use them to communicate with potential customers.
What’s to Gain From Digital Analytics?
Well, a lot! With the help of analytics, you can then analyze your data to learn exactly how your customers are interacting with your business. You’ll also be able to uncover insights that will help improve business and marketing performance.
The process involves collecting data through analytics tools, seeing how users have interacted with your website, store, and social media channels. It can then help you to make decisions based on the behavior of users or audiences.
A survey on analytics gains by Microstrategy
The more you know about your customers' behavior the more effectively you can plan your marketing campaigns and run your business.
You can use analytics to drive growth by analysing the data based on past and current behavior and derive strategic changes for future based on these insights.
So - What’s In It For You?
Customer-Centric Measurement:
Understand how your customers interact across your websites, apps and throughout their entire cycle. Learn how people engage and the role of different channels with advanced analytics and reporting.
Get Smarter Insights:
Uncover new insights and anticipate future customer actions with the help of analytics tools and get more value out of your data.
Connect Insights to Results:
Take action based on insights from your analytics tools and improve marketing performance. Taking correct action based on data as evidence is the way to go.
Make Data Work:
Quickly analyse data and insights and collaborate with your marketing campaigns to curate personalized ads along with real-time reporting to stay ahead of the learning curve.
The Three Phases of Analytics Used To Drive Growth
Past Data Analysis:
The idea is to find out what happened, why campaigns performed well or why they underperformed. It uses historical data to identify current trends and behavior, to shape the current marketing strategy.
I.e Focusing on channels performing well and underperforming, rectifying the issues and if something works well, doubling down on it to scale for more growth.
Ex: OTT platforms such as Netflix, and Disney+ use it to identify user behaviours and watching patterns or to identify which genre they prefer. Similar content is then recommended to them based on these insights.
Using Data Analysis to Predict Future Trends:
Analysing the data to predict future trends and scenarios. Many digital platforms use machine learning AI to provide such predictions.
It helps with personalizing the customer experience, making predictions based on what users want to buy, and allowing one to curate offers that can in turn help to sell more.
Ex: These types of predictions work well if there is an upcoming sale and one wants to get an idea about what products are in demand and have the potential to sell more. Black Friday Sales, Christmas Sales etc.
Using Analytics For Next Plan
This entails using data analysis to determine what to do next. Based on how your audiences interacted with your business previously, and using the same engaged audience as a benchmark to strategize your marketing campaigns.
This is very useful as you can upsell and cross-sell recommendations to increase customer retention by analyzing existing customer behavior and remarketing your existing audiences with different offers with more value to build loyalty towards your brand.
Ex: Many smartphone brands such as Apple and Samsung use this strategy to sell their smartphone accessories such as watches to their existing customers.
Useful Digital Analytics Metrics You Should Know
Metrics are the statistical measures to determine the success or failure of your marketing efforts. To determine the impact of your marketing campaigns, find new opportunities and improve returns and customer lifetime value, you will need to focus on some actionable metrics to track your growth.
Here is a list of some metrics you should keep track of:
Conversion rate:
This is probably the most important metric to keep track of. It lets you know if you are completing your goals. Your aim is to keep conversion rates as low as possible. A good conversion rate indicates a successful funnel and a bad conversion rate indicates something is not working and needs to be fixed. Measure it accurately to calculate overall growth.
A number of actions taken/Total number of visits = Conversion rate
Conversion actions/goals could be following: Purchases, signups etc.
Engagement rate:
This is defined by the total number of engagements/interactions. It will give you an indication of how effectively your audience is involved with your content. A high engagement rate indicates your strategy and content are working otherwise it needs some work.
Eg: clicks, shares, likes, etc
CTR (Click through rate):
This shows you the number of users who have interacted with your content compared to the number of users who viewed the content. It’s crucial for evaluating the relevance of your content.
Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate is the number of users who exited your website after only viewing a single page or having a very low-duration session interacting with your content.
A high bounce rate indicates users are not liking your content. It could also be an indication of issues with the user interface such as broken links, bugs, etc.
Sessions:
Events or actions taken on your website, such as reading your content or browsing through your product feed.
Longer duration of a session indicates how well your content is working to attract your customers and keep them engaged.
Cart Abandonment:
This is when an item is added to the cart but no purchase is made, the customer has abandoned their cart. This could be due to various reasons. You can work with this insight to try and find a reason for it. Afterwards you can remarket these visitors with the goal of converting them successfully.
CPC (Cost Per Click): CPC is the amount you pay each time any user clicks on your PPC ad. High CPC means your ad/ad copy is ineffective and needs improvements or you are not showing your ads to relevant audiences.
CPA/CAC:
Cost per acquisition is the cost of converting a lead into a customer or purchase of a product. CAC is the sign of your sales and marketing. The less CPA you are getting while acquiring customers the more profitable your business will be. If it is high, it signals your marketing or products are failing.
Of course there are many other metrics that can be beneficial to keep track of your business, what’s required is to keep a keen eye for these metrics and analyse this data to your advantage for sustainable growth.
Use of Analytics And Defining Goals or KPIs
The use of analytics depends upon the goals set which are backed by the metrics. The logical connection between the measurement of key performance indicators to make your marketing decisions successful.
Define your goals and KPIs
Use analytics tools to bring together to measure every aspect of your marketing and business. Identify how channels and marketing platforms work and how users are interacting with them.
Define what your end mission or goal is
Keeping it short, what do you really want as an end result, eg subscriptions, purchases, calls etc.
Create actionable goals so that you can track the progress and measure outcomes to improve your marketing campaigns and strategies.
Define your KPIs - Key Performance Indicators
Drive results from your goals by turning raw data into actionable insights using KPIs. KPIs are important to keep track of your ROI and keep moving forward in the right direction.
Define KPIs that relate to your goals. Ex: if your goal is to improve sales with sustainable returns then you should focus on ROI as your main KPI. You will be able to sustain your growth if you keep a balance between your marketing spend and return on investment.
Metrics support KPIs to give an overall picture of your marketing performance and insights to improve your strategy and keep track of your goals.
One must understand the KPIs which are beneficial for one’s business, and narrow down the strategic changes to include in your marketing planning.
Best Analytics Tool For You?
To select the tool which is suitable for you, consider the following points beforehand choose what’s best:
- Does your choice of tool provide multi-channel integration?
- Does it offer customizations around metic, views, dashboards, and reports?
- Is there an ease of use and user-friendly interface for both technical and non-technical users?
- Does it provide user privacy and data security?
Tools you should consider for Digital Analytics:
Google Analytics
For overall web analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool by Google and one of the most popular analytics tools across the 85% of websites present on the internet.
Google Analytics is considered to be a good multi-channel analytics tool that can be linked to marketing platforms like Google Ads.
Parse.ly
Use Parse.ly to measure engagement from visitors and subscribers, and identify new content marketing opportunities.
Supermetrics
Supermetrics is a paid tool that provides multiple add-ons for your marketing channels.
Use to measure KPIs, and custom reporting across multiple advertising channels such as Google and Facebook ads
Adobe Analytics
Formerly known as Omniture, Adobe Analytics is a powerful enterprise-level tool that offers a wide range of advanced features, such as multi-touch attribution and predictive analytics. It is often used by larger organisations and enterprise companies.
Piwik
Piwik is an open-source analytics platform that offers many of the same features as Google Analytics, but with the added flexibility of being able to host the software on your own servers. This allows businesses to maintain full control over their data.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a user-centric analytics tool that allows businesses to track user behavior and engagement on their website and mobile apps. Its key features include A/B testing and push notifications, which allow businesses to optimise their user experience and drive conversions.
KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics is another user-centric analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyse the behavior of their individual users. It allows businesses to understand and optimise the customer journey, and also includes features such as cohort analysis and retention tracking.
Clicky
Clicky is a simple, yet powerful, analytics tool that allows businesses to track and analyse their website traffic in real-time. It also includes features such as heatmaps and A/B testing, which can help businesses optimise their website and increase conversions.
To Wrap It All Up
Once you have data ready, you can try analysing it using the various tools listed above. We’ve mentioned some of the more popular analytics tools available, however there are many other tools available such as Hot Jar, Heap Analytics, Crazy Egg, Optimizely, etc.
How do you find one that's a good fit for your company? It's always advisable to have a clear understanding of the business objective, audience size, and budget before landing on any tool. You can start by considering your organisation's needs and determine who will be using your analytics tool. Do you have sophisticated data analysts and data scientists, by nontechnical users who need an intuitive interface, or should it suit both kinds of users?
Something else to consider is price and licensing. Some tools are free, while others charge licensing or subscription fees. The most expensive tools are not necessarily the most feature-complete so don’t ignore the many great free solutions available.
Still not sure what digital analytics are suitable for your biz or want to know more about how we can help you optimise your digital marketing efforts? Don’t hesitate to reach out to our team for a chat!
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