By Jewelle Saunders
Measuring your marketing efforts is a necessary step to move your brand forward and find sustainable success for your business. Understanding marketing analytics allows your marketing efforts to be more efficient and effective. Getting familiar with your data and learning how to use those measurements will make you more in tune with your audience and produce more effective results.
Here are our key benefits to measuring your digital marketing analytics and some recommendations for how you can start tracking them.
Making goals and measuring success
Once you have the goals for your business or organization set, you should work to define what success looks like for you in meeting these goals through your marketing. Are you trying to increase your customer base for your online store? By how much? Are you aiming to get more individuals pledging their support for your organization? By what date? Consider and define what success looks like for your business in clear and concise terms, with numbers, dates and intentions directing them.
Understand that you will try multiple marketing methods. Flexibility is key, and trying only one strategy is not going to work for everyone. Think of the various approaches you are taking to increase your marketing, such as added social media platforms, increased video marketing, a partnered online sales platform, forms listed automatically in your emails, etc. When you determine which efforts you are going to take, then choose which metrics are important to you to determine impact per each strategy. The individual parts make up a whole and these strategies will all contribute to your overall goals and measure the success of your business.
What are the benefits of measuring digital marketing efforts?
While you generally understand that more views or gained followers on your website or social media platform could mean an increase in potential customers, there are many other benefits to taking a deeper look into your data.
- You will have a better understanding of your audience’s wants and needs. What days and times work well to provide new information and inspire action? Which platforms are they responding to? Where are they from? How old are they? These questions will help you to back up your initial assumptions about your audience and help determine future audiences of markets you want to break into.
- Notice and predict trends in products or services with your audience. What trends are emerging or dying out in popularity? Are there certain pages on your online store that are not being accessed regularly, or emails that are not being opened and read? You can more easily identify trends in your data that may reflect trends in the market.
- Find out where you can be more efficient. Are your clients finding it hard to fulfill an order on your e-commerce site, or are they unable to access your videos on YouTube? Analyze your data more regularly and ask for feedback to make sure that your site is functioning properly and working best in terms of user experience.
How to get started tracking your analytics
There are many resources for you to access your data for your business. Consider Google Analytics to better understand your website traffic. Google Analytics provides free courses as well ways to better understand your website’s visitor behavior trends. Track these analytics on your own terms, via a spreadsheet or otherwise and document trends that you are seeing.
Within each of your social media channels, you should be able to work “behind the scenes” to view your data, such as with Facebook and Instagram. Social media dashboard tools like Cyfe, SEMRush and Hootsuite also help to see multiple streams of social data channels at once. Within these platforms, you can look at times when your social posts are performing well, compare them between different time frames, consider which posts get commented on more than others, and make interpretations from there based on those patterns.
Consider every avenue
If you are not getting an answer to your question about not meeting a metric or a goal from one of these methods, try another route. Here are 50 different metrics you could possibly look at to measure a campaign’s performance. Once you have identified trends in your analytics and data, from there you can make determinations as to what might work better to meet your goals. Trial and error is key, so don’t be afraid to try something and see if your efforts are paying off. If they’re not, you can always try something else! Know that the data is working for you, ready to help you find success.
Head to #YLAIBrandBetter for even more resources on how to find success with your marketing efforts!