Before discarding that digital marketing strategy you’ve worked so hard for, have you considered analyzing its performance?
Yes, the digital marketing strategy may have missed the expected mark. However, you could optimize it and get it to surpass the mark, ultimately saving you a lot in running a fresh campaign. Think about it!
Digital marketing analytics is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting the metrics or results from the marketing channels specified in your marketing strategy.
Through digital marketing analytics, you can understand what works and doesn’t, allowing you spend on and optimize any strategy efficiently. Here is how you can go about it! Also, stick around to the end to discover more benefits of reviewing digital marketing analytics.
Phases of Digital Marketing Analytics
1. Review the strategy’s goals and objectives
Remember your strategy’s goals and objectives? You must review them to have a clear picture of the expected outcome. The goals align with your overall business objectives, charting a course for business progress.
While exploring the set goals and objectives, keep a close eye on the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). KPIs are measurable and specific metrics tied to specific goals to help track the goals’ achievement rate.
2. Collect the metrics
Return to your strategy roadmap and reference the outlined data sources and KPI tracking mechanisms. For instance, if you wanted to boost brand awareness on social media, your data source could be Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok. Then, the tracking mechanism would be the respective built-in insight tools.
Various social media platforms have insight tools to help monitor audience interactions, engagement, and more. Looking at a social media platform like Twitter, there is an insight tool monitoring engagement metrics including likes, retweets and replies. These are some of the metrics you may have to collect.
To enhance the metrics collection process, you can use a residential proxy to collect region-specific data.
When you buy a residential proxy, you get access to unique device IP addresses. This allows you to collect accurate metrics showcasing the campaign’s performance in various locations. This level of accuracy helps you understand the local customer better and modify the strategy accordingly.
3. Cleanse and validate the metrics
Now, you ensure data quality before analyzing the data. To do so, you should cleanse and validate the metrics to guarantee accuracy, consistency, and completeness.
Sift through the metrics to spot and correct any errors. For example, you may have duplicate entries, inconsistencies, or missing values.
Ensure the data in hand aligns with the goals and objectives outlined in the digital marketing strategy. This is where you counter check whether a marketing channel aligns with its relevant metrics for comprehensive analysis.
4. Analyze the data
At this point, you should have well-formatted and quality data ready for analysis. Here are four popular data analysis techniques you can employ:
- Descriptive analysis: Involves examining the data to understand the strategy’s performance based on the metrics. Analyzing metrics like social media comments, likes, dislikes, and impressions helps understand what happened while the campaign was in action. You can use some statistical calculations to derive meaning or theoretically break down what’s happening.
- Diagnostic analysis: Reveals the reasons behind what you discover from a descriptive study. Why the patterns or trends? From this technique, you can identify the factors contributing to the success or failure of parts of the strategy.
- Predictive analysis: Entails feeding machine learning algorithms or statistical models with descriptive and diagnostic analysis findings to forecast trends and patterns. The predictions you make can help shift and allocate resources efficiently, preparing the strategy for another run.
5. Create different reports
Now comes the point where you put the insights gained through metric analysis into a simple format for various business stakeholders. Create visuals, including tables, graphs, and charts, to communicate the insights effectively.
Since each stakeholder has a unique say on whether to keep or terminate the strategy, you should customize the reports for each. This simplifies decision-making and supports the overall business goals and objectives.
6. Make data-driven decisions and optimize the strategy
After each stakeholder reviews the reports, a meeting may follow to discuss the strategy’s effectiveness. If they find it viable for optimization, they’ll present their proposals for discussion and consideration.
The stakeholders make the final decisions based on evidence rather than intuition. And, after approving particular proposals, you adjust the strategy to reflect the decisions.
7. Put the strategy to the test and iterate
Once the improved strategy is in place, execute and monitor the results for a specific period. Then, repeat the whole digital marketing analytics process to identify more areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments.
Benefits of Digital Marketing Analytics
1. Competitive advantag
Through analytics, you can compare the output of your marketing efforts to that of competitors, identifying areas for improvement. This comparison helps set realistic standards and goals, ensuring you remain relevant and competitive in your respective market.
2.Improves ROI (Return on Investment)
Monitoring and optimizing marketing strategies improves cost efficiency over time. You can cut costs on underperforming tactics and increase the budget for high-performing marketing channels and tactics. This move leads to more engagement, conversions, and sales, which ultimately bolster ROI
3. Enhances customer understanding
Analyzing the metrics of various marketing channels can give you profound insight into customer demographics, preferences, and behavior.
Using these insights, you can craft more relevant and personalized digital marketing strategies to better understand customers.
4. Grants you predictive capabilities
Through predictive analysis, you can anticipate future market performance, allowing you make informed decisions about marketing strategies, resource allocation, and product development. This is possible as predictive analysis considers historical data to predict future customer behavior and preferences trends, potential challenges, and more.
Closing Words
Running any digital marketing campaign costs money. Sometimes, the figures can run into the thousands or more. So, would you throw out a strategy without investigating why it did not work or hit the expected mark?
Well, this piece serves as a guide on how to examine any digital marketing strategy and decide whether to optimize it or develop a new one. Take a read to understand digital marketing analytics and its benefits.
