As WSI's Digital Power Hour Webinar Series concludes with 2015's final edition, we're going to discuss the all important realm of web analytics. My name is Neal Lappe and on October 27, I'll be running our last session, Using Web Data to Improve Online Conversions.
Here’s the thing about analytics: everybody knows and says data is important, but how many of you are backing it up in your strategies and campaigns?
With the way marketing is being bought and sold in today’s hyper aggressive digital space (hint: not always researched or thought out) it begs the question: how much money are companies wasting on marketing campaigns that aren’t working? And how long do these leaky strategies go on before somebody realizes and addresses the problem? Without analytics, the answer is far too long.
There’s no doubt you care about maximizing the ROI of your marketing budget, which means you need to know how to properly apply analytics to your campaigns. Here are some of the things data can help you do better:
Understand Your Customers
No matter what business you’re in, the key to selling more of your products and services is finding and understanding your real customers. By “real” I mean the people who will benefit and find value in your brand’s offerings. How these customers engage (or don’t engage) with your digital properties is a direct indication of how they perceive a) your brand and b) the content they consume (whether it’s a landing page, blog post or tweet).
Here’s a basic example: let’s say you create a landing page with a specific offer. You spend a lot of time creating the offer, crafting the perfect landing page and when the time comes, you hit social media hard with the message that you’ve got some free value for your customers. And then...crickets. No engagement with your social post and no people signing up for your offer.
For starters, there is something wrong with your offer. If you have any sort of audience and social following and still don’t have anybody taking you up on free value, then it’s definitely the wrong offer. This begs the question: did you base your offer and the data you’ve collected?
Your analytics hold the answers to questions like: which of my site’s pages get the most traffic? What blog posts are being read and shared at the highest rate? And what kinds of social conversations are driving the most engagement? You’ll often hear analytics are confusing, and while that becomes true when you need to dig deep into the numbers, this stuff is easy. There’s no excuse for not understanding how your customers are using your website!
Identify Challenges and Opportunities
We’ve discussed how data can diagnose a challenge (such as the reason an offer isn’t doing well) but it can also highlight opportunities for your marketing strategy.
What would you give to learn more about what your potential customers are thinking while they’re browsing your site? Well, you can do this rather easily with a pop-up survey. Sure, a certain percentage of people won’t fill it out, but you’ll get value feedback from those who do.
Want to know what users are struggling to find on your site, and what content they’d appreciate that isn’t actually there? Simple, just look at the data from your site’s search feature and you’ll have great information on potential ways to improve the user experience of your site.
I’ve briefly discussed a few ways to apply analytics to your marketing campaigns, but there’s an endless amount of insights you can glean from the data you already have!
Ready to go a little deeper? If you've got any questions or concerns about digital marketing, contact us now.
