A beginner’s guide to digital analytics

Understanding the top five benefits

Tracking your digital analytics offers many benefits overall:

1. High-level data that provides insights into acquiring new users, as well as understanding their needs, for a focused user experience that develops into long-lasting relationships/returning visitors.
   
   
2. Helping improve operations productivity, as well as optimizing the organizational processes tailored to your business needs and user demands.
   
   
3. Recognizing trends that drive your strategic marketing roadmap for things like new services, features, and products.
   
   
4. Opportunities for a personalized user experience through insights in a multi-channel environment.
   
   
5. Mitigating fraud to ensure timely responses for real-time threat detection processes, automated alerts, and efficient fraud reporting and risk management efforts

Digital analytics gives your team the chance to improve their digital strategy with actionable insights, giving your users a seamless, personalized experience every time.

Types of digital analytics

Since a digital analytics tool is able to showcase the entirety of your online experience, you’re able to get a bigger picture of your audience, accessing the reporting for each of your channels to see where users are, what they respond to on various platforms, and how you should focus your marketing strategies for a maximum return on time and resources. While there are many subcategories of digital analytics ranging from social media to CRM and billing, some of the aspects of your business you can analyze might include:y

• Users. Check the number of website visitors, user behavior, bounce rate, conversions, and customer journeys.
  
  
• Websites. View your site’s visibility index, on-page search engine optimization (SEO), and backlink analysis and monitoring.
  
  
• Shopping and e-commerce. Follow conversion-tracking, email campaigns, and cross-selling campaigns.
  
  
• Advertising and marketing. View campaign tracking, as well as tracking affiliate links across omnichannel marketing efforts.

Digital analytics vs. digital marketing

It might seem getting all the data points available to you is a good thing but that can be overwhelming for a lean team to handle. You must be able to analyze the right data subsets, as it offers the clarity on what your team will need to improve on through the results they’ve gathered, to prepare for which marketing strategy to implement. This usually happens for three reasons:

1. Trying to simplify important analytics by lasering in on specific data points.
   
   
2. Not matching business goals with the available statistics, and therefore, not connecting your goals to measurements so your business can’t reach a successful run.
   
   
3. Not understanding how your data is measured and calculated.

Digital analytics takes the data you’ve gathered, identifies the basic benchmarks, and analyzes that information to help you understand customer wants and needs. Digital marketing allows you to build content and marketing strategies that target users with market research and intelligence, tailoring your marketing efforts to ensure success. One cannot exist without the other—after using your digital analytics tool to turn that data into actionable insights, digital marketing will help shape the marketing strategies you’ll need to make successful conversions.