The accurate collection, analysis, and utilization of marketing data prove to be substantial hurdles for quite a few leaders and marketers. Doing data collection right and then applying the appropriate digital marketing data analysis techniques can lead to truly invaluable insights regarding your business. You’ll see where your resources are best allocated, what your consumer base responds to, and where and when your various marketing efforts can turn into sales. If you want your business to enjoy a great competitive edge, then you need the proper digital marketing analysis strategy.
Keep reading to learn the 4 steps of a marketing data analysis strategy you can use for driving business growth.
1) Define The Issue:
The first thing that you need to know is simply what problem or issue that you’d like to solve. It’s only when you know this that you’ll know just what kind of digital marketing data that you have to track and then analyze. If you do the wrong analysis of your digital marketing data or even just track the wrong data, then it’s going to lead to improper assumptions. In a similar vein, making choices without any or all of the data is going to prevent you from moving ahead in any kind of meaningful or measurable way.
Ask yourself just what you’d like to know or simply what problem that you think needs to be solved. At this point, generalities are fine, although your issue is better off if it has a KPI related to it. That might be ROI, conversion rates, sales, brand awareness, or even leads.
An example is useful in going through the various digital marketing data analysis process steps as you solve some kind of problem or issue.
Imagine that you’re a marketing manager, and you’ve chosen to look hard into your website. You think it’s not performing as well as it could, and you’d like to generate a growing number of leads from it.
2) Establish Data-Driven Objectives:
When you have defined your problem and the objective you’d like to see happen, then you need a goal or objective that is actually measurable so that you can see if you’re going in the right direction or not. Digital marketing data analysis has to be rooted in benchmarks and goals if the numbers are going to have any appreciable meaning. Your goals need to be based on your prior digital marketing data analysis, or simply other applicable benchmarks that you’ve accumulated. Your goals honestly should be hard to attain, but not impossible.
If you want to adjust your goals accordingly, then you have to figure out what performance level is going to accomplish them. That helps you get very specific. From there, you’ll be able to determine just what you need to improve as well as how much it has to improve in order for you to reach a particular goal.
Consider the previous example of an underperforming website. Your web analytics tell you that your very best landing page gets 12,000 visitors a week, along with 140 leads, and your lead conversion rate is 1 percent. In such a case, you might assume that improving your lead conversions is something that makes more sense than boosting your traffic. You might have previously doubled conversion rates on related or similar pages, just by optimizing your page load speeds, and yet still, none of your landing pages have conversion rates more than 4 percent. From all of this, you have to figure out how many leads you have to generate in order to attain a challenging yet achievable goal.
3) Gather Accurate Information, Statistics, And Data:
In order to come up with the proper conclusion and then emphasize the appropriate improvements, you have to utilize reliable digital marketing data analysis tools. That means that the data you get needs to be easily interpreted.
If you want to gather your data with accuracy, then you are going to need a way in which you can track user behaviors. The right plugins, URLs, and codes can tell you how users got to your page, what they wound up clicking on, and even whether or not they saw a particular ad. Such tracking codes might include HotJar plugins, Facebook Pixel, URL tracking codes, or a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet. When you use tracking devices like these, be sure that you set up events properly, so that devices know just what to track. For instance, you might need to set up Google Analytics code snippets in order to track things like conversion events.
Once you have tracking devices installed and the events are all set up, then you need to integrate all of them with a compilation or data gathering platform so that you assess how well your digital marketing data analysis strategy is working out for you. For this, you might need to integrate your analytics and website tools with Hubspot or some kind of other CRM system. You might even prefer to just use Google Data Studio, Data Box, or some other data compilation platform.
When you assess the specific performance of your landing page, you might notice that your conversion rates actually dropped for the last two months. If you want to be sure that your data is accurate, then you’d consult your web design team regarding the tracking code from Google Analytics. You might wind up figuring out that a chatbot you installed recently is interfering with your tracking code. The design team can fix this issue, so you later test the code to be sure that conversion events are not being properly tracked.
You might realize that something is still happening though when your sales team reports that none of the leads from new landing pages are showing up to them. You already know that some of the generated leads have to be sales-qualified, so your suspicions point to an issue between your sales and marketing CRM systems. Surely enough, you wind up finding that any leads that marketing determined to be classified as sales-qualified, because of a CRM system error, were getting delivered to regional salespeople they weren’t supposed to go to.
Finally, in order to get a broad view of the page’s performance, you should add both the CRM system and Google Analytics reports to Data Studio. You can create a custom report that looks at whatever landing page your working on, which can provide you an easily-read chart showing sales-qualified leads, marketing-qualified leads, general and total leads, traffic, kinds of traffic, conversions, and clicks, among much, much more.
4) Focus On Informed Changes:
If you want to reach your goals, then you have to figure out what you’re going to change as well as how you’re going to change it. At this point, you’ll need to imagine and project changes based on your prior digital marketing data analysis, as well as any other related or applicable estimates. Use testing like A/B testing to study individual results and measure the impact each change has.
In the previous example, improving landing page loading speed double conversion rates previously. You can be reasonably confident that this will happen again, but you should still make this change first and foremost and then confirm the results of speed upgrades on enhanced conversion rates.
As you expect, your conversion rates double once there’s a speed upgrade. Your next suspicion might be that a shorter page form with an additional explanatory video can make things improve even more. A/B testing will confirm or deny your form hypothesis, but you’re probably right and your conversion rates go up again. You can then do another A/B test for just the video to see conversion rates rise thanks due to it. Then you do another test with both changes to make sure that they are cumulative. This might seem like a drawn out process for just one landing page to get better, but you will have accomplished far more than that. You’ll have created a framework that lets you uncover the various problems through your site and then solve them with data, information, and facts, rather than guesses. You just need to make sure that any objective you target can be given the necessary time and resources to solve or accomplish it. If you don’t have time, tools, or experience, consider hiring the services of a digital marketing agency to handle this process for you.
