In 2024, if your business doesn’t have an online digital presence it basically doesn’t exist.
At a time when most consumers are discovering and learning about new brands and products online, your company’s marketing strategy needs to include a digital approach to connecting with potential and existing customers online.
So how do you know if your digital marketing campaigns are delivering the results you want? With digital marketing analytics, of course.
What Is Digital Marketing Analytics?
Digital marketing analytics is the process by which digital marketers study the marketing data from their digital marketing activities and gain actionable insights to optimize future campaigns.
This should be an ongoing process for marketers as they track how each digital channel is doing and figure out what changes they can implement to improve marketing performance.
While similar to other forms of marketing analytics, digital marketing analytics differs in one key way: the focus on digital channels which are constantly evolving means digital marketing analytics requires more frequent analysis of data that is as near to real-time as possible.
The uniqueness of each digital marketing channel (e.g., websites, social media platforms, and email) means that marketers have to track different metrics for each to truly understand performance.
Any and all trends identified and insights generated will be used to inform existing and future digital marketing strategies in a feedback cycle that is aimed to optimize customer experience and, as a result, campaign performance.
How Digital Marketing Analytics Works
This is a big question with an answer that may vary depending on which one of the different types of marketing analytics you are dealing with and the marketing analytics tools you have to work with.
The standard answer is that it works systematically, and here is the typical approach:
- Set Goals: The marketing team, in alignment with management’s overall business direction, needs to have very clear goals about what they want to accomplish with their digital marketing campaigns and activities.
- Define Metrics: An essential part of having clear goals is defining the metrics with which to measure marketing efforts and how close the team is to achieving their goals.
- Collect & Track Data: Once you have your goals set and metrics defined, you execute your online marketing plans all while collecting and tracking the data that will be generated as potential and existing customers interact with your channels.
- Analyze Data: Your digital marketing analyst will play a crucial role in conducting data analysis and identifying significant feedback and trends.
- Implement Changes: Based on your discoveries about customer behavior and customer preferences as well as what engagement strategies and content work best, you need to implement changes to optimize your digital marketing approach.
- Repeat: Once you have implemented changes, you need to continue to collect, track and analyze the data to validate your approach. If the changes proved ineffective, you will be able to identify why through this process of digital marketing analytics.
Important Metrics Under Digital Marketing Analytics
As we mentioned, you will need to define your metrics for measuring digital marketing success.
These metrics may differ depending on the digital channel you are looking at. Below, we highlight some important metrics for four of the most common digital channels.
Website Marketing Analytics Metrics
Website marketing analytics or web analytics metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) businesses use to measure the success of their web marketing efforts.
These include:
- Website Traffic: the number of people visiting your website over a period of time, and can be broken down further to measure the number of unique visitors, sessions, pageviews, and bounce rate.
- Average Session Duration: the average time that users are on your website.
- Conversion rate: Your number of conversions divided by the number of website visitors.
- Click-Through Rate: The number of clicks on an ad or post divided by the number of impressions.
- Exit Rate: The number of website visitors who exit your site without converting.
Email Marketing Metrics
Email marketing metrics are the KPIs businesses use to measure the performance of their email marketing campaigns.
These include:
- Open Rate: the percentage rate of email recipients who saw the email in their inbox and opened it.
- Click-Through Rate: the percentage of email recipients who click on a link or call-to-action within the email.
- Conversion Rate: the rate of email recipients who converted, such as filling out a lead form or buying.
- Unsubscribe Rate: the percentage of email recipients who unsubscribe from the mailing list after receiving the email.
- Bounce Rate: the percentage of emails that were sent but unable to be delivered.
Social Media Marketing Metrics
These include:
- Impressions: the number of times a social media post is viewed, sometimes broken down further into unique impressions.
- Engagement: the number of likes, comments, and reposts that a social media post receives.
- Click-Through Rate: the percentage of users who click on the link or call-to-action included in the social media post.
- Follower Count & Growth Rate: the number of followers the social media account has and the rate at which it is growing over a specified period of time.
E-Commerce Metrics
E-commerce metrics are the KPIs e-commerce businesses use to measure how their online stores are doing.
These include:
- Purchase Rate: the percentage of website visitors who make a purchase.
- Average Order Value: the average amount of money spent per order.
- Cart Abandonment Rate: the percentage of visitors who add items to their cart but do not check out.
- Customer Lifetime Value: how much revenue the customer will make the company over the lifetime of being a customer.
Common Digital Marketing Analytics Tools
Digital marketing analytics is a big undertaking for businesses of any size, especially with so much big data to comb through and study.
Luckily, there are plenty of digital marketing analytics tools to make the process more accessible and efficient to marketers, so don’t be deterred by the potential barriers to marketing analytics.
The one analytics tool everyone has probably heard of is Google Analytics. When using Google Ads or Facebook Ads, marketers also have access to the built-in analytics platform for these products.
Depending on the functions and features you are looking for, there is a digital marketing analytics tool that will fit your needs.
In today’s market, there are even ones that employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to help marketers work smarter when it comes to all things marketing analytics, including data analytics, digital analytics, and business analytics.
Aside from these marketing analytics software platforms, marketers can also look into tools that can work in tandem with analytics tools.
These tools, such as a customer relationship management platform and a customer data platform, can improve the customer experience businesses provide and subsequently, the performance of their digital marketing efforts.
Conclusion
At this point, we would be remiss if we didn’t plug our own analytics solution. Woopra offers an analytics platform with real-time individual-level analysis and intuitive data visualization for your digital marketing analytics needs.
Give Woopra a try by starting a free trial today.
