In order to reach your target audience, it is important to have enough online presence. This has made it hard for brands to ignore online marketing. And to attain this presence, you must first understand the importance of analytics in digital marketing.
There are close to 4.57 billion active internet users as of April 2020, encompassing 59 percent of the global population. When online marketers shy away from excavating deeper to know why the numbers are behaving the way they are, then there is a huge problem. Numbers do not lie. However, making such bold decisions is easy to say rather than doing. The question remains- what is the significance of analytics?
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While the number of online and social media users is increasing, so is the amount of online marketing data. Social media platforms and online marketing tools help you to dig into this data to make sense out of it. Understanding this data is important as it can help you to figure out everything that you must know about your target audience.
Today’s customers look for a personalized experience, and you cannot provide such an experience without understanding them well. Therefore, accessing data about your audience plays a vital role for you. Let us understand the significance of analytics in digital marketing and how it can be used to build a personalized experience for the customers.
For understanding your customers
Data is important to understand your target audience. Data from their demographics, behaviors can help you find out what your target audience will do and what finally will convert them to customers. Demographic data can offer you a great picture of your target audience’s persona, including their locations, interests, and age. This data is valuable for your company as it can assist you in deciding the steps that you have to take to customize your offerings.
For making data-driven predictions
When you analyze your data, you will see trends. Do a predictive analysis. This will help you to make more data-driven, insightful decisions. You will be in a better place to find out what you need to market and when should you do so. Such analytics can also help you to find out when your product or service will be in demand. Moreover, data can help you to foresee future trends in your industry. Making use of this data, you can quickly move your approach to suit trends and make the most out of your online marketing campaigns.
For optimizing the results
When you start understanding your customers, you will be able to bring improvement in the methods of advertising to them. You can also analyze the data of your campaigns and try to find out why and how your customers behaved with your content the way they did. This analysis can help you to improve your campaigns by changing your channels, messaging, or frequency. For example, the data will show you if your online marketing campaign performed better on emails or social media. Based on this information, you can decide where to invest to achieve higher returns.
Now, that you understood the importance of analytics in digital marketing, let us have a look at the basics of online marketing analytics.
Basics of Digital Marketing Analytics
Analytics are readily available as far as digital marketing is concerned. Whether it is the total number of website visits, coupon codes, or email marketing campaigns, you have a lot of opportunities to influence data analytics. Let us see what the basic blocks of online marketing analytics are.
Website
In the world of digital marketing, the most basic requirement for a business is a website. A website is a portal through which your target audience can know about your company. It is not simply used for contacting you, but also for product inquiries, to find apt content, and much more. Thus, a website is one of the most significant online marketing tools available. It delivers the right information and keeps the audience engaged. And, in return, you get data and insights.
Forums and comments
While a company’s blog is a great source for delivering information to your customers, it also helps you to grow your brand through content marketing. It can be used for expanding your reach and generate new leads to achieve more conversions. Your audience can engage with your content by sharing your blog or by commenting on it. While seeing the comments you may feel pleased about the information that you are providing to your audience, they can do many other things than that. Through their comments, you can understand your customers better.
Comments show how interested they are in your blog. You can check their tone, the kind of questions they ask, and always keep an eye on who is posting the comments. Doing this will help you to modify your content as per their requirements.
Similarly, forums can also be useful in helping you to understand the pain points of your customers. By following what is being discussed and narrowing down on the most frequently asked questions, you can get ideas for your next blog.
Google Analytics
If we are discussing the basics of analytics in digital marketing, understanding Google Analytics is a must. It is one of the most important web analytics tools through which you can get a lot of data about your site. The data that you will find through Google Analytics will help you to understand your target audience and find out the best methods of reaching them. While it is simple to use once you are habituated with it, the huge data available on it can be irresistible to you in the initial stage. This can be much simpler if you have a new website. In such a case, you would not have too many metrics to track.
Here are some basic online marketing analytics metrics you must know
Dashboard Metrics
These are the metrics that you can see on your Google Analytics dashboard. The dashboard provides a brief overview of your site, and you can find out how is it performing. The three main dashboard metrics that you must consider are bounce rate, page visit, and average visit duration.
Most visited pages
To find out what your customers are looking for when it comes to your site, you must look at your most visited website pages. You can do this by checking the Landing Page segment in Google Analytics. Landing pages are the pages on which customers to your site land first. This is the page through which your target audience is likely to form an impression about your site.
Referring websites
It is important to know which websites are bringing the maximum traffic to your site. Many of your customers might be visiting your website by finding your link on other websites. You might even have an affiliate marketing campaign going on, so you may want to trace back the sales and traffic to your affiliates. To check these, you must go to the “Referrals” or “Source/ Medium” segment in Google Analytics. The referral segment will provide a list of websites that are bringing traffic to your website. To make things simple, you can make use of UTM.io. This tool helps in creating UTM codes. At the same time, you can handle all your UTM codes and track all your campaigns effortlessly.
To successfully promote your brand online, you must understand the significance of analytics in digital marketing. Analytics provides you access to loads and loads of data about your audience and your company’ s online presence.
By using this data in the right way, you can make the right decisions and improve your marketing strategies. This, in turn, will help you to optimize your return from online marketing.
Do you know any other benefit of using analytics in digital marketing? Please share your thoughts on the same in the comment section below.
