March 3, 2020 •DJ Team
Digital analytics refers to tools or platforms that analyze the data collected from your online marketing activity. The goal of using such tools is often to improve customer experience, engage new audiences, and convert more of the consumers you’re engaging with into paying customers.
These analytics might produce the insights you gain from activity on your website, social media channels, or a variety of marketing channels used by your business. Ideally, you use the information from your analysis to track the way your content is performing, gain insights from your audience, and decide how to change or enhance the content you're creating.
Your digital analytics should give you insights which are actionable. Because there are so many variables and so much data that can be reported on, it’s often challenging to turn this data into a clear strategy or to inform specific marketing tactics.
Why Digital Analytics is Important for Your Company and Brand
People often focus on web analytics, but digital analytics encompass more than just what can be gathered from your website. There are key analytics on one platform or site that can help you determine a lot of different information about your visitors and the content on the site itself. The value of digital analytics is far further reaching because it offers you ways to gather key insights and more accurately quantify the ROI of your campaigns.
Digital analytics reporting sorts and showcases the entirety of your funnel. You're not limited to getting the data collected from just one platform. You're able to access the reporting for each of your channels to see the bigger picture of where your audience is, what they respond to on various platforms, and where you should devote your time.
There are numerous benefits of digital analytics. It can help you determine which marketing channels are not performing well so that you can decide whether to increase efforts there or decide if the content would be better used on a higher performing channel. You can easily see the difference between views and conversions. For instance, you might note a higher traffic coming from one channel but a higher conversion rate from another. That may tell you that you're not targeting the right audience. Digital analytics help you put all the pieces together to view your marketing efforts as a whole, rather than divided into segments.
The Elements of Digital Analytics
The elements of your digital analytics include all the aspects of your digital marketing strategy. When using advanced analytics in digital marketing, you can look at individual problems or aspects of your customer journey in order to gain useful, actionable insights.
The elements of your strategy will be unique to your business and the consumers you're targeting. These might include:
- Content Marketing Strategy. In a wide sense, your content marketing strategy includes all the content that you create and curate. This is not only the content you add to your own website or social media platforms. It should also include your recommendations or linked articles, as well as places you've published pieces.
- Email Campaigns. Email marketing, when done well, still offers excellent conversion rates. The analytics you're looking at here may include open rates, click through rates, and more intricate data about the types of content and their conversion rates.
- Video Marketing. This might include videos on your website or social media platforms or a channel you use, such as YouTube.
- Paid Advertising. If you're using paid advertising (such as search or display ads), the analytics from the respective platforms can help you tailor your reach to offer higher ROI.
One thing you'll look for when you deal specifically with the individual elements is the digital customer analytics. These data sets will help inform your customer personas and build content specific to them to drive engagement .
Types of Digital Analytics and Uses
The digital analytics definition encompasses all the data that you can collect, which makes it fairly confusing. It's not just your Google Analytics on your individual website. You can gather data based on the market, your user activity, your content performance, and on a number of other variables.
The best place to start is with your strategy. When you develop a digital marketing strategy, you need to set goals that will help you analyze the current data and make adjustments in order to hit your benchmarks. Digital analytics examples: if your goal is to increase followers and reach on a certain channel, you'll want to study the analytics for your posts on that platform. You'll be able to see which hashtags worked well for you, which posts gained followers or activity, and most importantly, which activities led to conversion. You also want to make sure you’re using the right analytics tools to get an accurate overview of your marketing performance.
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