Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Digital marketing analytics
Digital marketing analytics involves collecting, measuring, and analyzing data that both relates to and impacts your digital marketing efforts. For digital marketers, much of the data you analyze relates to websites, campaigns, or mobile apps. As digital marketing data analysis develops, many businesses will use tools that enable them to see all their campaigns, website, and mobile app data in one place, such as Google Analytics 4.
Google Analytics 4, or simply GA4, is the latest version of Google’s market-leading web analytics tool. It aims to unify data across platforms and devices such as websites and mobile apps for a more joined-up view of customer interactions.
Digital marketing analytics tools
Digital marketing analytics tools provide information about:
- The origin of website and app traffic
- How users navigate and interact throughout a website and mobile app
- What content, web pages and app screens users are most engaged with
- When and how uses exit your site and mobile app
Using this data, marketers can optimize their digital channel, website and mobile app performance based on data-driven insights and data-led decisions. Bear in mind that not all organizations have a mobile app, and most will be concerned with just their website analytics. But for those businesses who do have a mobile app, it’s important to know that you can unify the traffic across devices and platforms for a complete view of the customer experience.
Benefits of using analytics tools
A fundamental benefit of using analytics as part of your digital marketing efforts is that any actions you implement, and decisions you make, should be driven by the insights derived from the data you’ve collected from your audience’s interactions with your website, content, and mobile app. In other words, you’re not relying on guesswork or just gut instinct to make decisions.
Other benefits of using analytics as part of your digital marketing efforts include:
- Getting closer to the customer
- Understanding your users
- Gaining insights from real customer activity
- Forecasting, using trends and patterns in your customer behavior
Furthermore, digital marketing analytics also helps to provide accountability of media spend and resource allocation, as well as providing you with a stronger focus to help with prioritization of resources, driving higher conversion rates, and enhancing ROI.
In addition, analytics is an important information source to help you report to key stakeholders on how campaigns and website activity are performing in relation to KPIs and objectives.
Ultimately, you are trying to recreate scenarios that led to commercial outcomes for your business or clients. The advantage of digital marketing is that you can drive performance by measuring and acting on the data trends you observe using analytics software. In other words, data analysis enables you to deduce the story behind the data in order to gain valuable insights to enhance business performance.
But how exactly does data analysis lead to commercial returns or value for your organisation? Well, data analytics can help you understand your customers and your audience better. It tells you who they are, where they’re coming from, and what interests they have. It tells you about their demographics and location. It also helps reveal any conversion challenges that might exist on your website or mobile app. And it helps you appreciate what consumers like or indeed don’t like, and how they interact with your content. You can use all this information to improve the user experience (UX) of your website or mobile app and to optimize the channels that consumers use to visit your website and engage with your business.
Back to TopCathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
Kevin Reid
Kevin is a Senior Training Consultant and the Owner of Personal Skills Training and the Owner and Lead Coach of Kevin J Reid Communications Coaching and the Communications Director of The Counsel.
With over twenty years of experience in Irish and International business with an emphasis on business communications training and coaching, he is a much in demand trainer and clients include CEO’s, general managers, sales teams, individuals and entire organisations.
With deep expertise in interpersonal communication through training and coaching and in a nurturing yet challenging environment, Kevin supports teams and individuals through facilitation and theory instruction to empower themselves to achieve their communication objectives. This empowerment results in creativity, confidence building and the generation of a learning culture of continuous self-improvement.
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
- Critically analyse the process of using analytics tools to create insights
- Critically evaluate the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools in enhancing marketing strategy
- Evaluate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data and its use in informing business decisions
