While there I a lot of buzz about that digital marketing can do, very few appreciate the power and possibilities of Digital Analytics. Digital Analytics opens up the possibilities of collating, measuring and analyzing internet data and humans behaviours in order to make digital intelligence-based decisions. Far before the digital media revolution, Chris Ducker had said that what we cannot measure we cannot manage and digital media puts this quote on steroids. In this emerging world of digital marketing, there’s practically (and arguably) nothing you can’t measure – from activities, location and people. The fact that you use a digital device, are on social media, click on a link online ensures that almost everything about you can be known and can be predicted. While many peo ple disagree that analytics can measure and make predictions about their behaviour, analytics also predicts most people won’t agree with that fact, but their behaviours still follow a predictive pattern are still follow a consistent pattern.
However, digital also comes with its complexities. When simple traditional marketing reigned like a mighty colossus, measuring the effectiveness of your marketing was fairly straightforward. If you distributed handbills, paid for a radio or newspaper campaign over the course of three months and at the end of the period, you saw an increase in shop visits or you saw an increase in sales, the advertising was affective. True to words, no one could really trace your profit to your marketing efforts; most times it is a favourable guesstimate of your efforts. Digital however has this as a powerful feature and it is also its weakness; everything can be measured. With the amount of data available through analytics, entrepreneurs, marketing managers and departments can no longer afford to generalize marketing efforts. You can measure how several website designs against your probable traffic; you can find out which pages attract your website visitors, you can identify those who clicked on items but didn’t buy, you can identify the websites they visited before and after your website and use this intelligence to make informed decisions about converting your target market online into customers. Digital Analytics can help you track your campaigns by mapping your customers through the buyer’s cycle from impressions, to clicks, and ultimately conversions.
Because of the massive amount of metrics available, there’s also the temptation on getting obsessed with metrics to the extent that it impeded your business activities and objectives. The unnecessary focus on the number of likes, follows and pins will not keep you in business, it only ensures that you have amassed a number of followership on another person’s property. This is why understanding analytics include getting to know the metrics that are important to your business and the ones that are good to know. The massive number of digital fraud numbers attest to the fact that people are interested in shoring up their numbers. It is a common gist that people buy like and follows on social media.
Why Digital Analytics Matters
Digital Analytics helps you reviews the effectiveness of business’ marketing communications across your online channels including your website, social media channels and mobile. It nor only tells you the channels and tactics working, it also exposes the ones you need to allocate more resources to maximize its effectiveness. Analytics essentially provides actionable insights that informs business and marketing strategy across all channels.
What to measure
Lol. So many businesses focus on building likes, follows and pluses without actually knowing
Because it is the most common metric people like to brandish to one another. However, having ten thousand phone numbers without any converting is a waste of everyone’s time. If your main business objective is to drive sales, it will influence what you measure because ultimately what you need is revenue, not fans. What you need to be focusing on includes metrics like engagement, fan growth and reach, you should also consider how that can translate into revenue.
How to measure
Here we talk about tools and techniques. Here there are several online tools available for businesses to track and measure the effectiveness of your digital and social media channels and activities. From Alexa and Similar web for comparatively measuring website traffic and rankings to Google Analytics for analysing internal website traffic and user behaviour. Most social media channels most notably Facebook and Twitter comes with its internal analytics tools while there are also cross channels tools that help you measure your social media activities.
What to do with it
The possibilities available to you when you have results is astounding. Imagine if you knew like a friend of mine did that over seventy-five of his website visitors use mobile phone to access his business website. Imagine when Amazon realized that they increased their paying customers by over three hundred percent by changing the word ‘register ‘to ‘sign up’. It really is up to you what you do with the results of your analytic measurement.