Digital Marketing Analytics
Digital Marketing analytics is a vast ocean with various parameters to be looked at, analysed, and understood. In order to make sense of the multitude parameters and information gleaned from various analytics platforms and tools, it is important to get a hang of what is what.
One of the first points you need to understand is the difference between web analytics and digital marketing analytics. Web analytics has largely to do with analytics related to one’s website, the amount of traffic being directed to it, the sources of traffic, the search terms used to land on the site, the demographics of the website visitors, so on and so forth. On the other hand, digital marketing analytics is to do with all analytics data related to a website, the digital marketing campaigns carried out, and so on.
Digital marketing analytics is a field which is constantly changing, constantly getting updated. The Facebook Ads Manager and Power Editor undergo periodic changes in terms of the features and things like that. Same goes for Google Analytics as well. Google Analytics normally changes in terms of UI and addition/deletion of a few features.
Coming to the parameters that are important while evaluating a digital marketing campaign, a few are listed below. These parameters can be divided based on the platforms from where you will be extracting the data.
Starting from Google Analytics, and going till say Instagram, there are numerous parameters you can look at. But, you will, in a way, also be looking at numerous parameters without adding value to your analysis.
Google Analytics
Website Traffic
Website Traffic is the amount of traffic or people coming to your website. It is important to check your website’s traffic on a daily/weekly/monthly basis depending on your digital marketing goals. Checking the website traffic will help you fine tune your digital marketing strategy on a regular basis.
Sources of Traffic
It is important for you to understand the sources f4rom where your website is generating traffic. This helps you figure out which platform should be made use of more than others, to promote your business.
New vs Returning Visitors
New vs returning visitors is another parameter to check if there are new visitors to your website and also to see how many visitors to your website are coming more than once. It is important to have increasing numbers for the new visitors section as this would mean more people are being made aware of your business. At the same time, it is also important to make sure the returning visitors’ numbers are increasing and if not, at least not decreasing. An increase in the number of returning visitors to your website would mean your website has enough value to entice visitors to make a second visit, and then a third, a fourth, and so on.
Average Session Duration
The average session duration will give you a rough estimate of the amount of time visitors to your website have spent, on the whole.
Average Time on Page
The average time spent on a page of your website will help you understand how useful the page is for your target audience.
Facebook Page
Number of Page Likes
The existing number of likes on your Facebook business page will help you craft a marketing strategy for Facebook, depending on your business goals. Also, if you are running a Likes based campaign, it helps you understand the number of Likes you can aim for, through a paid campaign.
Engagement on Posts (Likes/Comments/Shares)
The engagement rate of your post in terms of the number of likes, comments, and/or shares it has received is a good enough indicator of how your content is taken by your target audience. This will help you fine tune your social media marketing strategy periodically.
Time when most followers are online
The time at which most of your followers are online will help you understand the best times to post on your Facebook business page.
Reach
The reach of your posts also helps you understand how many people are able to view your post. This helps in analysing the kind of posts that are doing well as well as the type of post Facebook shows to a larger audience.
Reach
On Twitter, it is necessary for you to understand what sort of tweets give you greater reach and what types of tweets give you lesser reach. Accordingly, you can choose a mix of tweet types to optimize the reach.
Impressions
Impressions in Twitter lingo, basically refers to the number of times the tweet has been viewed by people.
Engagement
The engagement of a tweet would take into account any and every possible way of interacting with a tweet, on Twitter.
Instagram Business Profile
The Insights section of Instagram Business profile gives you insight into various metrics and parameters of your post such as reach, impressions, and a host of others. But, the insights is available only on the Instagram mobile app and not the desktop version.
These are some of the key parameters for some commonly used social media marketing platforms. While there are numerous other parameters of analytics in digital marketing for each of these platforms, depending on your marketing goals, you need to look at specific parameters. Depending on the platform where you’re looking at the analytics, there are various digital marketing analytics tools you can use to monitor the aforementioned analytics parameters and many more.
Some of the tools you can use to monitor the aforementioned parameters of digital marketing analytics as well as a whole lot more, include the following.
Digital Marketing Analytics Tools
Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps you monitor analytics related to your website and the other parameters related to your website. All you have to do is integrate the code given by Google Analytics into your website. And once it is implemented properly, you will be able to track your website traffic easily and fine tune your website promotion strategy.
Facebook Power Editor
This is a tool which not only helps you run paid ads on Facebook, but also lets you monitor the campaigns so you can fine tune the campaign based on the performance.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics helps you understand the performance of your tweets. It will also help you figure out the types of tweets that work best for your industry and target audience.
Instagram Analytics
This is an in-app feature for Instagram Business accounts. This section will give you various metrics such as reach, engagement, and others.
The aforementioned points will give you a fair understanding of the concept of digital marketing analytics. What we have here is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of analytics and the digital marketing analytics tools. There is a whole world out there for you to discover, explore, and understand. When you start implementing digital marketing strategies practically and monitoring the effect of these strategies, that is when you will be able to dig deeper into the world of digital marketing analytics! Happy number crunching!
