With everything going digital, one of the biggest challenges that companies are facing today is the measurement of the effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts. While web analytics tools like Google Analytics offer insights into website performance, but when it comes to understanding the effect of marketing campaigns on conversion rates and the buyer’s journey through the marketing and sales funnel, only digital analytics can provide marketers better insights for taking suitable business actions.

With the use of digital analytics data, enterprises can optimize their customer experience across websites, mobile apps and mobile sites which can help them enhance their marketing ROI, product offerings, and boost the overall company performance.

Let’s take a closer look at digital analytics, its advantages for enterprises, and some key mistakes to avoid to get the best results:

What is Digital Analytics?

Digital analytics may be defined as the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from the business and existing competition for bringing continuous improvement of the online experience delivered to the customers leading to improved business outcomes.

The evolution of technologies such as big data, cloud computing along with the huge explosion of connected devices, and the enormous computing power through real-time communication networks has made data collection much easier and affordable today. With large volumes of customer data available to the enterprises, it has become possible for them to analyze this data and use it to deliver a superior level of personalized customer experience. By utilizing the right mix of skills, technologies, and vast data which is available at their fingertips, enterprises are transforming their digital marketing initiatives.

Key benefits of using digital analytics

Access to real-time analytics

Digital analytics tools provide up to the minute information regarding the customers which helps business executives in taking faster and quicker decisions and enhance the overall customer experience. It’s possible to derive better insights into the behavior of the website users ranging across a broad spectrum right from the website, mobile, and social media channels. Apart from this, digital analytics can also provide instant updates across corporate dashboards reflecting the business changes that occur throughout the day.

Effective tracking of user attributes

With digital analytics, it becomes easy to identify different types of users coming from across geographical locations, track the sources used by them to reach the website, understand the keywords used by them, get glimpses into the events which lead them to the website etc. Based on different types of user attributes which are gathered, businesses can use the data to refine and modify their site design or content and enhance their marketing campaign to reach across their target audience and show relevant information to the users.

Track website performance and usability

Page loading times can have a huge impact on user experience and is a vital part of usability analytics. Digital analytics tools help in evaluating some of the key metrics including calculation of page load times, the speed of navigation, assess traffic sources and devices. This information is extremely useful in improving page loading speed and in recognizing the pain points of the visitors. It also helps in providing a more personalized experience to them by analyzing their past behavior.

Get measurable results for greater effectiveness

It’s possible to monitor conversion metrics and evaluate them against user behavior, time and marketing campaigns. At the same time, companies can find out which of the various marketing methods such an email marketing, display advertising, social media campaigns have shown a better impact on website conversion rates. This helps in assessing the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns.

Common digital analytics mistakes that must be avoided

While the benefits of digital analytics are very clear, since this is a relatively new space, there are some common aspects which are often overlooked by companies. Let us take a look at some of the common mistakes to avoid –

Embarking on digital analytics without having clear goals

The primary objective of digital analytics is to boost the company’s marketing efforts. However, quite often, businesses are unaware of the metrics that they need to track and what they want to achieve through those. There are instances where a lot of web-based companies don’t even have a conversion tracking mechanism in place. It’s imperative for every company embarking on a digital analytics program to set specific goals for effective tracking of their users and link those metrics to business goals and outcomes. Having goals is necessary to answer specific business questions and concerns of the target audience.

Choosing advanced analytics tools which may not be necessary

It’s quite common for companies to use the most expensive and sophisticated analytics tools with higher capabilities to get detailed insights for solving their business problems. However, not all the companies require the use of advanced analytics tools due to different business goals and needs of their business. Hence, the decision of investing in such expensive tools must be entirely based on the business objectives which the companies wish to achieve else it could lead to wastage of money and valuable resources.

Unable to spot out tracking errors

Most companies are unable to detect tracking errors which can produce unreliable and misleading results. The difference in the reports may seem to be negligible for a smaller set of data, but it can lead to disastrous outcomes over a period.  Such errors often go unnoticed as it requires a mix of both marketing and technical skills to identify and fix such errors. It is extremely important to check the data for accuracy and look out for unusual patterns of data in the reports to address this issue effectively.

Overlooking key metrics by using too many non-essential metrics

Due to the capabilities of advanced analytics and computing power, it’s possible to track and analyze a lot of metrics. However, such plethora of metrics can shift the focus from using the core metrics which are required to achieve the real business outcomes. Rather than wasting time and resources on using advanced metrics which may not be required, it’s best to pay attention to the basic metrics to get the best results from the analytics program.

Conclusion

With every enterprise becoming a digital enterprise, organizations have no option but to adapt the right digital analytics strategy today. As data is the new oil, digital analytics has offered huge opportunities for gaining valuable insights from data for organizations. However, organizations need to remember that the data is of no value if it is not the right data and does not help in solving the real business problems.