10 Examples of Digital Analytics For Marketing

When you work in the world of ecommerce, understanding digital analytics is something you should not only learn about but also utilize daily. Digital analytics is important to your work and crucial in marketing efforts to grow your site traffic and sales.

If you’re hoping to grow your online sales, you simply cannot ignore digital analytics. They are a solid and successful marketing tool that makes life in a virtual world much easier.

What Are Digital Analytics?

Digital analytics is the process of analyzing data gathered from the online world. This data offers insight into how your customers or users are acting. They observe behaviors to measure and assess how a company should move forward and improve.

Digital analytics identifies both the things that are working for your company and those that are not. Taking this data seriously allows you to improve your visitor’s online experience using data-driven metrics so you not only gain leads but also turn them into customers. Make your visitors happy to convert them into sales.

Digital analytics is a tool that businesses can use to collect, assess, measure, and analyze both qualitative observation data along with quantitative numbers. Once you have this data, you can create and set a plan in motion to improve your business operations by offering a greatly improved online experience for those who come to your site. Here are the types of analytics data that can be used:

Examples of Digital Analytics For Marketing:

1. Website traffic — Lets you know what campaigns work and which ones do not.
2. Traffic by source — Where do your visitors come from? Organic? Direct? Referral? Social?
3. New vs return visitor — Shows your relevance and piece performance.
4. Sessions — Number of visits your site gets.
5. The Average length of the session — Knowing how long a visitor spends on your site helps understand navigation and ease of use.
6. Pageviews — How many times does a user visit the same page?
7. Pages with most visits — Helps show behavior flow.
8. Exit Rate — Shows when and where someone left your site to identify where a loss of interest may occur.
9. Bounce rate — Percentage of people who leave after only one page. This can show where issues on the page lie, such as slow loading or broken links.
10. Conversion rate — How many visitors turn into sales.

In Which Scenarios Are Digital Analytics Used?

Digital analytics needs to be used in any online business. That should cover almost any mid to large size company using ecommerce. Whether you are the marketing manager or top-level executive, analytics can be used to set out a path and marketing plan for the whole company. There are many scenarios in which digital analytics can be applied.

A marketing manager uses this quantitative data to understand sales and where the issues are that are holding potential customers back from completing sales. Knowing where they are abandoning their carts or showing disinterest in online marketing campaigns means you can reformat how things are being done. Analytics became a significant part of the marketing manager’s job when the world of business went to ecommerce. You cannot do a good job in marketing if you don’t know how the site is working and your customers are behaving.

• If you are in an executive position, digital analytics can be used for reporting, budgeting, and justifying staffing changes.
• If you see analytics tools telling you that digital marketing campaigns are not working or if prices are seen as too high and people are leaving without a purchase, you will know where there are issues.
• If there is an overwhelmingly high bounce rate, it may be time to look at your website developer and content staff.

Digital Marketing and Ecommerce Executive Colleen Romero weighs in on the various metrics within digital analytics, saying,

“The most important metric is conversion rate. It should be trending up or staying consistent, depending on where you are with your ecommerce initiatives. Seasonality should also be considered. If the conversion rate begins to drop, then I would suggest looking at the bounce rate and top exit pages as a start. You should also gather feedback from customers to further inform your analysis and troubleshooting.”

By understanding where the trouble lies online, you can budget to improve those areas, increase sales, or simply hire or fire staff to meet the company’s online needs. Numbers tell you who is doing their job, who is struggling, and who can address issues that the analytics show.

Digital Analytics Terms

Algorithm: A statistical process or math formula that lets you analyze data.

Anomaly Detection: Finding outlying items or events that don’t fit with the other data. There is no pattern.

Batch Processing: A way to process high amounts of data from transactions gathered over a period of time.

Clustering Analysis: Identifying objects that have similarities and putting them in clusters to figure out their differences and similarities in data.

Data: This can be sales numbers, marketing research, readings from tracking equipment, website user behavior, market projections, demographics, and lists of customers.

Data Analytics: Assessing big data sets to find patterns and correlations, trends, etc. It can be behavioral, descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, or prescriptive.

Data as a Service (DaaS): DaaS providers use cloud options to give data to customers on demand.

Data Integration: Combining data from various sources for presentation as a single source.

Database: A digital gathering of data and how it is organized. The data is entered into a database management system.

Exploratory Analysis: Analysis focused on identifying basic patterns in data that include outliers and unanticipated items.

Real-Time Data: Data that is read, processed, analyzed, and seen in milliseconds.

Software as a Service (SaaS): Enables businesses to host an application and make it available via the cloud.

Final Thoughts

If you want your company to lead the way in the ecommerce era, then you need to use digital analytics to build and grow your online work. You want to understand how your customers behave and how your site is working. Using digital analytics lets you adjust your business and your site as needed. You get to see what works and what doesn’t. Digital analytics can take your ecommerce business to the next level by gathering data, analyzing it, and allowing you to make beneficial changes.

If you are looking for further information on digital analytics or other ecommerce insights, sign up for The Ecomm Manager Newsletter. It offers lots of information and tips about the ecommerce world.

Originally published at https://theecommmanager.com April 22, 2020.