· The importance of digital analytic
Digital
analytics is the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your
business and the competition to drive a continual improvement of the online
experience that your customers and potential customers have which translates to
your desired outcomes (both online and offline).
One
of the most important steps of digital analytics is determining what your
ultimate business objectives or outcomes are and how you expect to measure
those outcomes. In the online world, there are five common business objectives:
·
For ecommerce sites, an obvious
objective is selling products or services.
·
For lead generation sites, the
goal is to collect user information for sales teams to connect with potential
leads.
·
For content publishers, the goal
is to encourage engagement and frequent visitation.
·
For online informational or
support sites, helping users find the information they need at the right time
is of primary importance.
·
For branding, the main objective
is to drive awareness, engagement and loyalty.
There
are key actions on any website or mobile application that tie back to a
business’ objectives. The actions can indicate an objective, like a purchase on
an eCommerce site, has been fully met. These are “macro” conversions. Some of
the actions on a site might also be behavioral indicators that a customer
hasn’t fully reached your main objectives but is coming closer, like, in the eCommerce example, signing up to receive an email coupon or a new product
notification. These are “micro” conversions. It’s important to measure both
micro and macro conversions so that you are equipped with more behavioral data
to understand what experiences help drive the right outcomes for your site.
· Core analysis techniques
Segmentation
allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your data. For example, you might
segment your data by marketing channel so that you can see which channel is
responsible for an increase in purchases. Drilling down to look at segments of
your data helps you understand what caused a change to your aggregated data.
Examples:
·
You can segment your data by date
and time, to compare how users who visit your site on certain days of the week
or certain hours of the day behave differently.
·
You can segment your data by
device to compare user performance on desktops, tablets and mobile phones.
·
You can segment by marketing
channel to compare the difference in performance for various marketing
activities.
·
You can segment by geography to
determine which countries, regions or cities perform the best.
·
And you can segment by customer
characteristics, like repeat customers vs. first-time customers, to help you
understand what drives users to become loyal customers.
· Conversions and conversion attribution
1. A macro conversion occurs when someone completes an action
that’s important to your business. For an ecommerce business, the most
important macro conversion is usually a transaction. A micro conversion is also
an important action, but it does not immediately contribute to your bottom
line. It’s usually an indicator that a user is moving towards a macro
conversion. It’s important to measure micro conversions because it helps you
better understand where people are in on the journey to conversion.
2. Attribution is assigning credit for a conversion. In last-click
attribution, all of the value associated with the conversion is assigned to the
last marketing activity that generated the revenue. However, there are other
attribution models that can help you better understand the value of each of
your channels. For example, rather than assign all of the value to the last
channel, you might want to assign all of the value to the first channel, the
one that started the user on the customer journey. This is called first-click
attribution. Or, you might assign a little bit of value to each of the
assisting channels in the customer journey.
· Creating a measurement plan
The measurement
planning cycle consists of the following:
· Define your measurement plan.
1.
Document your business objectives.
2.
Identify the strategies and
tactics to support the objectives.
3.
Choose the metrics that will be
the key performance indicators.
4.
Decide how you’ll need to segment
your data.
5.
Choose what your targets will be
for your key performance indicators.
· Create an implementation plan.
After defining your business needs and documenting the technical environment of
your business, create an implementation plan that is specific to the analytics
tool that you’re using. For Google Analytics, this means defining the code
snippets and specific product features that you’ll need in order to track the
data defined in your measurement plan.
· Implement your plan.
The next step is to have the web development team, or the mobile team, actually
implement the tracking recommendations that you’ve made. Some website
technologies will require additional planning, such as:
o Query string
parameters
o Server
redirects
o Flash and AJAX
events
o Multiple
domains and subdomains
o Responsive web
design
The most common features used in a Google Analytics implementation plan for a website:
o Implement the
standard Google Analytics tracking snippet. This gives you the bulk of the data
you need.
o Determine how
to track your KPIs. You can do this using goal tracking and the eCommerce
module if you are an ecommerce business.
o Use filters to
normalize your data so that your reports are accurate and useful.
o Use campaign
tracking and Ad Words linking to properly track marketing campaigns.
o Use custom
dashboards and custom reports to simplify the reporting process.
Maintain and refine.
The final step of the measurement planning cycle is to maintain and refine your
plan. Your business requirements and your technical environment can change over
time. Without a team to maintain your measurement plan, your data won’t keep
pace with your reporting needs.