Even too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
At the rate technology is developing, consumers are engaging more than ever before. Every click, swipe, and tap is a data point. Multiply that by an average of three devices per person, and it can get very hard to keep up with it all.
Research shows that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.
That’s why 62% of marketers are overwhelmed by the amount of data they have and 85% feel like they’re not utilizing it fully. Only 3% of those surveyed say their team has a strong capability when it comes to using cross-channel and cross-device data.
So how should you even begin to approach your data? How often should you be monitoring your data? How do you know if something is significant and not a random anomaly?
Let’s take a look at three different ways to slice and dice your data with Bitly Enterprise.
By The Hour
Real-time data can be extremely impactful for live events and fast-moving campaigns.
If you’re hosting an event, you can use Bitly to track engagement on booths, emails, and more. So if you’re pitching journalists, use Bitly to include more links to your collateral. That way, you can see if they opened and clicked through to the email.
When you’re giving a talk, use Bitlinks in the slides to see if people are interested enough to click and learn more after the event. You can also keep a slide with a link up at the very end of your presentation to give attendees time to engage.
At the booth, you should make sure that there are Bitlinks in all of your print materials, from case studies and product sheets to business cards. If you create a Bitly OneView campaign to track all of these activities, you can readily show what efforts had the most impact.
You can even break it down by channel to get more granular, like if you wanted to see whose business cards got the most clicks after the conference.
Photographer Brady Dyer even uses the link to go beyond business cards. Since travels often, he rarely carries business cards with him but often meets individuals or brands that he might want to work with. His solution? He created a virtual business card using his Branded Domain: dyer.nz/bdpcard.
“I type dyer.nz/bdpcard on their phone so that it will load straight there and automatically add all my contact information without having to copy and paste,” Brady says. “Once, I attended this global tourism opportunity conference and met the Prime Minister of New Zealand. I wrote a unique bit.ly link to my website on a card and was exciting to see he actually visited it.”
Recommended for You
Webcast, March 27th: How To Create, Promote, and Optimize Your Content For Growth And Revenue
90 Days
Get into the habit of pulling results at the end of each quarter when you’re planning out budget and strategy for the next quarter.
At Bitly, the marketing team uses the 90-day window to understand how much engagement we drove across blog, social, website, and in-product messaging. Because Marketing has its own user seat, we can be confident that every link created from the Marketing account is being cleanly tracked and segmented out.
By pulling our results for this past quarter, we were able to learn that Email is our biggest channel, followed by Facebook. We also learned that our audience is most heavily located in the U.S. These insights might tell us to double down on Email and Facebook in the coming months and drill deeper to create targeted content for U.S. audiences.
Year Over Year
Set benchmarks by averaging out performance across the past year. This usually gives you a large enough sample size to be confident that your results are statistically significant.
Use this number to quickly see, across your Bitly dashboard, which months over-performed and underperformed and then dig deeper at a link level to see what might have contributed to this.
If you’re a regional manager, you can set all of your teams up in Bitly Enterprise through Brand Manager. At the end of the year, you’ll be able to quickly compare and contrast how much engagement each country or city drove.
You can also use this same slicing and dicing method to compare departments. Pull a macro and micro view of how the customer loyalty team is performing and then switch right over to acquisition. See how prospects are engaging in real-time and then switch over to see how customers have interacted with different parts of your product over the past year.
We’ve seen CPG brands use OneView, a feature of Bitly Enterprise, to create dashboards where they track shorter one-off campaigns, like “Influencer Campaign: YouTube” versus quarterly sales, like “Jewelry Sale Q1 2016.” Grouping your efforts like this allows you to analyze performance across campaigns and teams.
Link Your Way to Better Data
In today’s complex digital landscape, it can feel like you always have too much to do and too little time.
Links give you back time and money. Zero in on what content resonates the most, which channels drive the most ROI, and when your audience is most engaged.
It all starts by setting benchmarks, testing, and rethinking the link.
The post 3 Ways to Make The Most of Your Data in 2018 appeared first on Bitly | Blog.
