Why is digital marketing analytics useful?

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Digital analytics helps optimize marketing campaigns to provide a better customer experience both for existing and potential customers. With analytics and digital marketing tools, you can understand customer perspectives, leverage numbers and deliver the exact ads clients want instead of relying on guesswork.

‍As the digital marketing landscape is ever-shifting, studying hard data for marketing decisions helps you generate higher returns on ad spend, create targeted campaigns, and build solid customer relationships from the start.

‍Digital marketing data analytics also helps you with the following:

Personalizing ad campaigns

80% of consumers expect personalized experiences from brands. But providing such experiences isn’t possible without analyzing relevant data on consumer behavior.

‍With digital marketing and web analytics tools, you can collect, analyze, and act on data such as customer search history, clicks, demographics, and even competitor strategies. These valuable insights allow you to assess customer interests and create specific campaigns that resonate with a small and highly targeted audience.

Predicting A/B test outcomes

‍A/B tests are often used to determine effective marketing campaigns. But running two or three test campaigns requires considerable time and resources. However, with some digital marketing analytics tools, you can determine these outcomes accurately without actually running the campaigns.

Analytics uses various test cases to predict the outcomes of a campaign, including customer responses, expected sales, and the overall return on investment. This saves considerable costs and resources, which can be directed toward the most successful campaigns.

Connecting cause and effect

Even after identifying strategies that work, you need to understand them on a granular level to identify exactly what elements promote positive behavior. With analytics, you can track key metrics for every customer action to understand elements that give the best outcomes.

‍Tracking metrics also helps you understand what influences certain negative actions. For example, if cart abandonment is a persistent issue, analytics helps you eliminate roadblocks to streamline the user experience. 

‍Digital marketing analytics directs your email marketing strategies toward better outcomes and higher ROI. But how can you make the most out of it? Here are some strategies you can use.

Five ways to leverage digital marketing analytics to increase marketing ROI

‍The right metrics combined with a customer-centric strategy yield great results for digital marketing. Follow these below strategies to create a strong, digital strategy and marketing analytics plan for your business:

1. Unify data from all pipelines and keep it analysis-ready

‍Data is the key to strong digital analytics outcomes. But if your data is catered throughout various sources, effectively analyzing it is difficult. That's why you need a solid pipeline that integrates data from all sources and prepares it for analysis

‍This can be third-party data related to customer behavior, data from customers themselves, and information from other sources such as social media or previous campaigns. Unifying it will create a holistic view of digital marketing metrics and analytics, ensuring that you consider every touchpoint for designing digital marketing campaigns.

‍Tools such as SprinkleData help you with extracting, unifying, cleansing, and loading data in unified repositories to create a single source of truth.

2. Use KPIs related to ROI

82% of marketers try to measure every single campaign. However, only one-third of them can effectively measure campaign ROIs. If you want to increase marketing returns, then your metrics should be prepared for ROI measurement. 

‍Use metrics such as sale price, cost per acquisition, number of sales, and so on to track ROI. Additionally, utilize ROI measurement tools such as Google Analytics to continuously measure marketing campaign ROI.

‍Keeping track of these metrics will help you identify campaign errors and fix them in real-time to prevent resource wastage and maximize ROI.

3. Get high visibility into customer journey

To understand customer behavior, you need to be present on all channels your clients use. Apart from running online ads, you can check social media channels, Google pages, review websites, and other offline and online touchpoints to gain insights and analyze customer journeys.

‍Additionally, you also need to track metrics at various stages of the buyer's journey. For example, track content views and clickthrough rates at the awareness stage. Or check the conversion rate and number of repeat purchases at the retention stage.‍

This helps you identify and improve problem areas in your strategy rather than revamping the entire campaign itself.

4. Translate data accurately

‍Marketers have access to large amounts of data. But only having data isn't sufficient to make informed marketing decisions. You need to translate it accurately for efficient usage in marketing campaigns.

‍This includes eliminating vanity metrics, comparing short and long-term insights, and analyzing the effects of marketing changes on productivity. 

5. Take action based on insights

Digital marketing analytics and the generated insights are only valuable if you take quick actions. This involves adding KPIs, experimenting, finding areas for improvement, and experimenting with strategies. Even if your current campaign performs well, you can add new elements or try different tactics to boost ROI. 

Dashboards and charts give real-time insights into campaigns that allow you to maximize experimentation while minimizing resource wastage. Leveraging this helps you switch strategies as soon as you detect a failure and rigorously improve marketing tactics.

Digital Analytics Examples

Digital marketing analytics looks different for each business, depending on its goals and requirements. However, a few metrics are commonly used to kickstart the data analysis process. Here are a few examples of digital marketing analytics: 

  • Segregating website traffic by source to know the best performing channels.
  • New vs recurring purchases to assess customer loyalty.
  • Bounce rate and exit points to identify discrepancies in marketing strategies.
  • Social media presence to track customer engagement in the form of likes, comments, and so on.
  • Predictive analysis to determine the performance of future campaigns. 

Digital Analytics Tools

1. Sprinkle Analytics

‍Sprinkle Analytics is a no-code data integration and analysis tool that provides granular insights internal customer data without requiring technical expertise. The tool seamlessly integrates data from multiple pipelines, transforms it, and unifies it for analysis.

With Sprinkle, you can enable all your teams to perform their own data analysis, even if they are non-technical. The platform gives you access to a number of data storage and data analytics and tools that give actionable insights for your business.

Key features:

  • Build reports with visual data analysis tools.
  • Create custom dashboards to analyze and track your own metrics.
  • Leverage several KPIs using a single platform.
  • Quick query resolution and response time to provide real-time insights.
  • Integrate with 100+ data source platforms.

2. Hotjar

‍Hotjar is an analytics tool that tracks user behavior to identify areas of least and most interest on your business site. It uses unique visualization in the form of heat maps to highlight areas of peak activity.

‍Using Hotjar, you can access behavioral data across all devices to optimize your campaign for all touchpoints. It also helps you collect first-party data through real-time surveys and questions for site visitors.

Key features:

  • Single glance overview of customer interactions through color coded heatmaps.
  • Track customer behavior on websites using recordings that include mouse pointer movements, pase visitations, scrolling, and so on.
  • Collect real-time feedback through pop-up questions and feedback widgets.
  • Automate user interview process to connect with customers.

3. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a visual analytics platform that uses graphs and charts to display metrics. The platform is built for data-driven organizations that want to analyze and share reports with multiple teams or non-technical stakeholders.

With insightful reports and custom dashboards, Whatagraph simplifies analytics and makes it shareable. It also simplifies data collection and tracks metrics from multiple user touchpoints.

Key features:

  • Transform complex data into easy-to-understand visual reports.
  • Drag-and-drop building blocks to create custom dashboards.
  • Track internal team performance along with client projects.
  • Integrate with Google Sheets, BigQuery, and other data management tools.
  • Connect with data warehouses to directly visualize data from the repository.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media analytics tool with cross-platform integration. The tool allows you to measure social media performance through advanced metrics such as link clicks, page visitations, and so on. 

The platform also allows you to manage social media channels and leverage them to improve customer satisfaction, sales, and ROI. With Social Sprout, you can transform your digital marketing strategy, with competitor analysis, keyword research, and insightful dashboards.

Key features:

  • Unified inbox to streamline tracking for all social platforms.
  • Post scheduling with planning, creating, and publishing options.
  • Social media page performance analytics through high volumes of social data.
  • Leverage social listening by understanding user comments, likes, and other interactions.
  • Empower individual employees to drive brand revenue by becoming ambassadors.

5. Cyfe

Cyfe is a KPI visualization and monitoring platform that creates an integrated dashboard for all marketing channels. From social media and websites to customer data sources, you can integrate any channel to get a holistic view of your marketing efforts.

‍Cyfe also gives you complete control over reports and metrics. You can create, customize, and name visual representations, change formats, and export these visuals to share with other team members. 

Key features:

  • Connect company databases or other data sources using APIs.
  • Use prebuilt dashboard templates to display and track 250+ KPIs.
  • Create a single view for all data types including social media reviews, emails, and sales analytics.
  • Integrate with 100+ services and leverage prebuilt widgets to streamline data analysis.

6. Zoho Social

Another social media analytics platform, Zoho Social, is an all-in-one platform for all your social media requirements. Along with customer behavioral analysis, Zoho Social helps you with post-scheduling, publishing, and engaging by predicting optimum times.

The platform also tracks relevant metrics and creates graphical representations for easy analysis. With Zoho Social, you can collaborate with creators, utilize paid ads, and work on all major and minor platforms to build a strong, data-backed social media presence.

Key features:

  • Schedule and publish social media content using a social media calendar.
  • Monitor customer interactions through keywords, hashtags, and comments.
  • Create reports to analyze audience behavior and leverage social listening.
  • Integrate with Zoho Suite products and other platforms.

Written by
Soham Dutta

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Why is digital marketing analytics useful?