Tapping into the Gold Mine of Digital Analytics

As a Master in Marketing student concentrating on marketing analytics, I am most interested in digital analytics in the vast digital marketing landscape. Analytics has also become a hot topic in digital marketing in the recent years. Most of the marketers have come to realize that analytics could be a weak area of many digital marketing programs or campaigns. Thus it is essential for digital marketers to better understand the value and strategy of analytics and upgrade the analytical capacity.

Everything is moving toward data: big data, mobile data, performance data, campaign data, product data, and even data about how we track our data. Thus any professional in the internet world from SEO to content can give themselves an edge by strengthening their data capabilities. Data skills will be a huge asset. For brands and agencies, the ability to manage successful campaigns will require strong data analysis human and technological capabilities.

Analytics world can be broken down into a few pieces. Creating and implementing an analytics program requires four steps:

• ·      Defining your metrics and developing a plan
• ·      Collecting the data
• ·      Developing reporting features and capabilities
• ·      Ongoing analysis and implementation

Understanding each of these core components enables a company to make the right investments at the right time to yield an ROI. Successfully building a data plan is about creating a culture that values data, ensuring that key business decisions are data-driven, and consistently finding ways to drive data deeper into the DNA of the business.

Data for data’s sake is not a good investment. Data must drive actions that generate conversions and revenue. Thus data collection and analysis efforts should be tightly tied to business bottom line. Useful data tracking comes down to evaluating:

• ·      Who are coming to your site, and what are those people doing once they get there
• ·      What channels are driving purchases
• ·      Who are converting
• ·      What conversions are deepening relationships
• ·      What conversions are driving revenue
• ·      What’s your lifetime customer value
• ·      What are your churn rates

Any solid analytics plan will take the business model into account and develop a set of metrics that maps to specific business needs. We can start by evaluating the current data state, what metrics we should be tracking, and what cultural impact adding data to the process is likely to have. Then we’ll be ready to take a deeper dive into understanding different analytical resources and technologies available to us.