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Using Analytics

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Channels

It is important to use analytics to establish the current situation and use that information to establish a clear set of KPIs and targets for those KPIs.

There are several tools available that can help you to understand the analytics of your channels. Organizations are really struggling these days to understand the analytics, as customers move from one channel to the other - from watching an ad on TV to surfing the internet on a tablet, to clicking on an email to moving to social on their mobiles. Channels that you can access analytics on are:

  • Website activity. Where are people dropping off from your website? What’s the dwell time? How are people moving from article to article?
  • Email marketing. What’s your open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate? How many people have marked you as spam?
  • Social media. How many people have shared your content on social media? How many impressions have you got?
  • Third-party advertising. How are people reacting to your ads?
  • Google Ads. What level of ad ranking have you got?

To reap the greatest rewards from marketing analytics, follow these three steps:

  • Use a balanced assortment of analytic techniques.
  • Assess your analytic capabilities, and fill in the gaps.
  • Act on what you learn.

Goals

Goals, which can be used to measure KPI targets, are configured at the view level in Google Analytics. With Google Analytics you can track:

  • Specific pages. You want to see which pages of your website customers are visiting. How are they moving between pages? Are they moving from page one to page two? Maybe they’re not able to find the product information. Maybe they can’t find the phone number. You want to see how they’re navigating between pages.
  • Screens your user visits. Which screens are they going to and how are they navigating to them? Are they going back to the home page and then accessing the content? Maybe you don’t have a back button. This kind of information helps you see the customer journey and how customers are accessing your content through the funnel.
  • How many pages/screens they view in a session. You have sent customers an email. They’ve opened the email. Are they reading it? Are they moving from the email to the main website to buy your product? How many pages or offers are they looking at? This information can help you devise a journey that’s appropriate to your customer. You don’t devise a journey working in isolation. You tailor and optimize it, based on customers’ behavior and the patterns in which they’re consuming content.
  • How long they stay on your site or app. What’s the dwell-time on your content or on your app? If people are dwelling on a piece of content for two minutes, you know the content is popular. If they click on an offer, it means they are interested in it. But are they actually redeeming the offer? And what offers work best?
  • Events they trigger while they are there. You might also want to know what events people are triggering. So when they go to your website or your Facebook channel, are they having conversations with their friends in a social network? Are they sharing your content? Are they clicking a call-back button? What are they doing? Suppose you have a group of customers you’ve identified who have added products to their trolley and then abandoned the basket. You could target them with an email, reminding them that they have one item in their trolleys and they haven’t purchased it.

Website analytics

Website analytics can be used to track user journeys and identify any blocks or barriers in these journeys, so you can make the necessary improvements.

The most important segments to focus on for each goal are as follows:

  • Sources of traffic: How have people navigated to your website?
  • Desired customers: Are these people likely to buy from us? Have they bought from us previously? Do they fall within a ‘priority audience’ which we are actively targeting?
  • Their attributes: What distinguishing attributes do they possess?
  • Their behavior: How do users behave when visiting our website? Which pages are most frequently visited?

As well as helping you to eliminate any barriers within the user journey, website analytics also act as a valuable tool for refining your digital spend. For instance, if your website analytics is showing that a high percentage of your customers are arriving from Facebook and cashback websites, then you could further prioritize spending on these channels to increase website traffic.

Reviewing analytics

It is important to review performance regularly, focusing on KPIs and their targets. This will ensure that individual activities stay on track, which is important so that the overall campaign doesn’t de-rail. If one activity, or a number of activities, vital to the success of the campaign aren't achieved, then it can cause the rest of the campaign to be put on hold and delay the whole implementation strategy.

Indeed, regularly reviewing performance is important both for real-time adjustments, as well as being a crucial means of informing realistic timelines so that SMART objectives can be set for future activities.

Reviewing analytics outside the KPIs can deliver additional opportunities for insight, but do not need to be reviewed with the same frequency as KPIs.

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Satarupa Banerjee

Satarupa Banerjee holds an MBA from Cranfield University and an MSc from University College of Science and Technology. She has extensive experience across numerous industries including insurance, retail, healthcare and banking. Currently, she heads Direct Marketing Products in Direct Line Group where she has delivered several CRM campaigns. In the past she has also held roles as Customer Value Strategies Manager, Change Manager, and Sales Performance Manager.

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Strategy Formulation and Plan
Satarupa Banerjee
Skills Expert

This module focuses on using strategic planning to drive marketing activities that will enable a business to win a competitive advantage. It covers assessing internal capabilities and addressing skills gaps, benchmarking, information gathering, SWOT analysis, evaluating digital channel tactics, and strategy implementation. It also covers documenting a digital strategy using SMART criteria and knowing how to evaluate the effectiveness of a digital strategy using KPIs, targets, and marketing analytics.