The Importance of Analytics in Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is incomplete in the absence of digital analytics. When digital marketers shy away from digging deeper to understand why the numbers are behaving the way they are; then there is a big problem. Numbers don’t lie. However, making such bold steps is easier said than done. The question still lingers –what is the importance of digital analytics?

The importance of data

The earlier advertising formats were not clear on the return on investment (ROI). It was faced with a challenge of accurately collecting and analyzing the data pertaining to a specific offline ad campaign. The process was tedious and generally inaccurate; it was based on the negative aspect or manual data collection. When the telephone calls subsided, changes had to be made on the running campaign.

Nowadays algorithms, complex computational, abilities, big data, and massive computer networks mean freshly grounded data is easily analyzed. There is no exception in digital marketing. Imagine how much a marketing strategy can be improved to meet personalized customer needs after examining consistent customer behaviors.

Once the data is collected it becomes easier to collect insights on a large group of customers. The insights include place of residence, shopping tendencies, ultimate desires, preferences etc. Additionally, the data is converted to great business marketing strategies, based upon the collected actionable information.

It begins with the website

There is a myriad of analytical tools specially designed to help marketers and businesses alike achieve a certain level of competency in designing and managing digital marketing performances. For instance, Google offers a free analytical tool to help marketers and businesses gather insight about visitors on their sites. It collects the information about where they have come from, how long they stayed on the site, how much content they read,  how many web pages they clicked while there and so on. Besides Google analytics, there are also many other analytic tools.

Measuring outcomes

Technology advancement allows analytical tools to examine other digital marketing platforms such as mobile applications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Point Of Sales (POS), all types of web application and even video game consoles. Measuring outcomes start with clear business objectives and how a business intends to measure or analyze them. Therefore, it is with digital analytics that a business is armed with ammunition to tackle any of these barriers.

A business needs to set clear objectives at the onset of any Internet marketing campaign. Secondly, through the help of marketing professionals, they need to understand how data is measured in each platform they chose to as part of their overall digital marketing strategy.

There is a continuous improvement on how analytical tools gather consumer insights meaning a business can really improve their digital marketing.