What if you could guarantee that the ads your business runs be delivered to your target audience in a specific radius? What if you could see how many visitors read your blog content and for how long? Your marketing efforts would be highly efficient and effective, providing a better return than traditional methods. In an ever-increasing digital age, that’s possible with marketing analytics.
What Is Marketing Analytics?
Marketing analytics involves tracking and evaluating data to assess the state of your marketing campaign/goals. Resources like Google Analytics can help you optimize campaigns you’ve delivered through various digital channels. You can also find out who is visiting your website along with when, where and how they are using it. So, what are some of the basics you need to know right now?
Traffic
Understanding where your audience comes from and how they interact with your brand is key to developing your business strategy. Google Analytics enables you to easily find out where the traffic originated. This can help you determine what tactics are effective, which ones aren’t and where you might want to invest more resources.
Direct Traffic
Visitors who went to your site by typing your URL into a web browser. Generally, these are individuals with some knowledge of your brand and may have purchased from you in the past or previously visited your website.
Organic Traffic
Patrons who found your website through unpaid sources. Generally, this includes those who use search engines to find a product, service or answer. Inbound marketing efforts, like blog posts, can help drive more organic traffic to your site.
Referral Traffic
Individuals who made it to your site after clicking on an external link on another website or social media platform without having used a search engine. This traffic means that interested parties are coming to your site from sources they already frequent.
Goal Tracking
Aligning your business objective with analytics allows you to see, change and react to collected data as it relates to your goals. Setting events in Google Analytics is an easy way to discern what methods are working best, giving you the power to weed out underperforming campaigns. These goals should be linked to events accomplished with some action on your website in order to be tracked through Google Analytics.
Take Parkway’s own Google Analytics. We set events to track specific actions we want viewers to take on our website. By tracking these events for a particular date range, we can see how many times the event occurred, the number of users and the number of actions taken per user.
1,752
Page Views
882
Unique Visitors
2
Actions Per User
Digital Efficiency
There will always be a time and place for traditional marketing campaigns. That being said, digital marketing offers a level of efficiency that just can’t be beat. Let’s say that you have an ad campaign that’s not currently meeting your expectations. Rather than waiting until the runtime expires, you can easily and quickly replace or remove the ad entirely. Maybe you have a few ads that only work well at certain times of the year, like during the holidays. After peak periods, those campaigns can be paused until they’re needed again.
The same is true for your website content. Analytics can tell you how many people are viewing particular pages or pieces of content. Say you have a blog about career advancement. You might have articles about using particular job-finding boards, how to prepare for an interview, or what skills you need for a specific career path. Using analytics, you can track your audience’s engagement and see what topics are resonating more with them. These results can guide you in future content creation.
Understand Your Audience Better
Analytics gives you crucial insight into your audience. Google collects the age, gender, interest and even the location of those who interact with your brand on the web. This information, and your audience’s level of engagement, indicates what your customers are hoping to gain from your website. As you begin to understand your audience better, you’ll be able to develop more of the content that they are looking for and provide an even more personalized experience.