Data Needs Goals to be Interpreted
Most digital advertising drives traffic back to your website, it’s there where you can really determine if you’re reaching your goals.
Google Analytics contains a tremendous amount of data. It’s easy to get lost in it. Add on the other tools and there are more metrics than we can count.
As always, understand your goals first, then you’ll know what data to look for and if you’re meeting them.
Acquisition
Activities aimed at gaining new customers.
Retention
Activities to increase the likelihood of a customer purchasing again, and/or increasing the profitability of those purchases.
Recovery
Activities aimed at recapturing past customers before they abandon you altogether.
‘Get more Instagram followers’ alone isn’t good enough.
(Usually)
Goal
Generate an average of 215 new platform leads for new homebuyers through various online channels in 20XX.
Objectives
Measurement and control require goals and objectives. This is the basis for our control activities.
The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website, ad platforms, 3rd parties, and the competition, to drive continual improvement of the online experience of your customers and prospects, which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline).
Analytics provide insights that help marketers make data-driven decisions, optimize marketing strategies and assess the overall success of marketing initiatives.
It’s expensive – production costs and limitations on reach contribute to the costly nature of traditional marketing.
Targeting is challenging – It can be a lot harder to define and target specific audience segments.
It’s harder to measure – not only is it difficult to attribute success from many traditional mediums, gaining real-time analytics is generally not possible.
Digital Marketing has many benefits that make it a great choice for marketers.
Digital marketing has a number of benefits, one of which includes the ability to effectively track success.
Some specific benefits include:
Analytics tells you what’s working and what’s not
Helps you make the right decisions based on data.
Each website CMS system offers its own version of web analytics. These are rather simple and not of much utility. For example:
The best of the best for free Analytics systems. This tool gives us significant control over our analytics story.
Analytics 360 gives more options for organizations but costs a bit of cash.
GA is not the only option out there. Many others have Analytics software that gives detailed access to metrics like GA, but they usually cost significant dollars. For Example:
All social platforms have an analytics system built in for organic and paid.
Some are better than others.
All give insight into performance-based metrics.
Just like social, advertising platforms and email platforms all have their own analytics programs. Most of them only show performance metrics for their particular area on their own, but most can be leveraged and moved into other reports for more clarity.
Anything Google owned merges together with GA nicely.
Some tools specifically are leveraged to look at competitive situations.
All of these tools collect data in different ways. One will rarely give you all the data you require accurately.
We have plenty of tools that can gather other types of data that is of value to an organization. These can come from either qualitative or quantitative sources. Some common ‘other’ types of data tools are ones like:
Start with a clear definition of qualitative data. Explain that qualitative data is non-numeric data that describes qualities or characteristics, often gathered through methods such as interviews, observations, or open-ended survey questions.
There are additional tools that work in conjunction with your Analytics platforms to help merge and manage all critical information where you desire it. Some of these tools are:
These tools don’t necessarily collect the data but make it easier to link and analyze. They are giving you more control over the data.
Campaign Manager
Looker Studio
Pick a Canadian Business and give us some optimizations.