Generally, every company lands in this position where they don’t understand why everyone is insisting on enabling analytics to their marketing efforts. In each company, marketing teams have to focus daily on a lot of elements at the same time like strategies, marketing channels to use, creation of design and content, promotion and repurposing and mainly the timelines. Not just that, constantly innovating what we have done before, is always at the back of their minds. Once they start seeing some responses to their posts and content, they tend to get confident with the marketing efforts they are taking. But sadly it doesn’t end there.
Analytics still needs to be addressed.
What does analytics do for me?
In simple words, analytics data tells you if your marketing is working or not, and tells you precisely how and where you can improve. Enabling analytics to your website, social media channels and other digital marketing tools can be the key to understanding your customers better. His needs, pain areas and how they feel about certain products or services. Understanding your target audience well will tell you which marketing strategy should be used as compared to the other. You can decide to opt for or stop some marketing channels based on that.
How is Website analytics different from Digital marketing analytics?
Website analytics gives you information about your website such as Visitor, Session, Page views, Traffic, Traffic by channel, Traffic by device, Ratios of new traffic vs. returning traffic, Time spent on a particular page, Bounce rate and Interactions on the page.
While this data is a lot and also very useful its incomplete. Today, marketing teams have extended their focus from websites to social media, email marketing, etc. With every channel, you use in your marketing, parameters for its analytics change. That is why, it is important to enabling digital marketing analytics for your marketing efforts as it includes data not only from your website, but also from sources like email, social media, and organic search.
How it’s good for your business to invest in digital marketing analytics?
Using digital marketing analytics allows marketers to identify how each of their marketing initiatives like social media vs. blogging vs. email marketing, etc. work against one another. Also, determine the ROI of their activities, and understand how well they\’re achieving their business goals. As a result of the information they can gather from all channels, marketing teams can also identify deficiencies in specific channels in their marketing efforts, and make adjustments to strategies and tactics to improve their overall marketing activity.
Digital Marketing analytics can help you turn your business objectives into measurable outcomes that support your lead conversion and in turn your business profitability.
What are the absolutely minimum analytics tools that I need to must-have?
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Google Analytics:
It is Google’s free analytics service for websites that allows you to analyze the visitors for your website. It gives you valuable insights into the success of your website and other marketing strategies.
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Email Marketing Tool Analytics:
You would need to use fairly simple pay per use tools like Zoho or Mailchimp etc. to send out your email campaigns. All of these tools would give you a fairly detailed report of the campaign you sent. Analyzing these reports would give you information on the visitor engagement of your email campaign. You can also understand which marketing message is more appealing compared to others based on this.
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Social Media Platforms Analytics:
Nowadays marketing teams are using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter at the minimum for their business promotions. Each of these channels would give you statistics on how each of your posts or tweets are doing. These statistics are inbuilt and are free of cost. Based on these reports, you can derive the understanding of which post or message is more liked vs other, with which you can decide to post more of that type of content.
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Google and Bing Webmaster Tools:
These free tools help you analyze and optimize your website to achieve great results in search engine optimization. These are used the most by SEO specialists from each marketing team.
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Google Alerts:
This is a free tool offered by Google to help you track mentions of your brand on the web. You can know who’s talking about you, and where they’re talking so that you can be part of those conversations.
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Google AdWords:
This is an enterprise tool offered by Google usually free of cost if you are only using it for keyword research. You can identify the best keywords to use in your website copy, in your content, on your social network profiles and everywhere to get the best search engine optimization.