Contrary to popular belief the phrase digital analytics isn’t just a synonym for web analytics—there’s a world of difference between them. Although web analytics provides invaluable insight—traffic sources, bounce rate and unique visitors—it’s only one piece of a very big puzzle. In order to get the full picture you need to assess the entire buyer’s journey, from initial exposure to the end of the sales funnel.
At the very heart of it, digital analytics is an overall assessment of your business metrics—leads, sales and influence—not only from your website, but also from email marketing, social media, influencer marketing, and even offline PR that has driven customers into the digital sphere.
The purpose of digital analytics is to understand and quantify the effectiveness of marketing as a whole, and then draw comparisons between each individual method: blogging vs email marketing, search engine optimization vs pay per click. Cross referencing this data is not only a powerful way to discover what’s working, but also what isn’t working and why.
Monitoring the Buyer’s Journey
In today’s digital world marketers tend to forget that they’re marketing for people, not search engines. The consumer should always be your target. Tracking how your prospects and leads interact with traffic sources (organic search results, Facebook referrals, email newsletters) on a human level will, therefore, provide a clear path to the next stage.
Imagine you’ve compiled a list of 1,000 leads, people who have signed up to your newsletter from your website, but are yet to take the last step at the checkout. Rather than focus your efforts on accumulating even more leads, you could try to turn those subscribers into customers. By focusing on the consumer and analysing their behaviour, with time, you will be able to establish a “quality score” for your leads based on their source, and then identify which marketing activities will generate the most profit. This will help you to implement an effective lead management process for each step of the buyer’s journey.
Utilizing Closed-Loop Data
Closed-loop data is the ability to tie marketing activities to sales and determine if your lead generation is resulting in profits and contributing to your bottom line. Through it, you can discover which channels are critical to your operation and which channels need more work or can be eradicated.
Additionally, you can discover other metrics that could aid your strategy. For example, social media might not generate sales, but it could be a powerful engagement platform for after-sales, i.e. customer service. In order to assess closed-loop data you must use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, such as Hubspot.
Integrating Multiple Marketing Channels
By using digital anayltics you can measure how well multiple different channels perform together. This is where the true power lies. For example, if you send an email out to your mailing list, directing people to your website, you will be able to work out exactly how many of these “click-throughs” converted into leads. This will help you to devise and execute more focused marketing campaigns.
Let’s use the real estate sector as a case study. Estate agents often send out new property ads to their email subscribers, and then use digital analytics to figure out exactly how many people opened the email and clicked through to their website. If these leads turn into property viewers, or even buyers, the data is then used to determine whether email marketing in conjunction with website marketing offers a worthwhile return. The same experiment can be subsequently performed again, replacing email marketing with another method (such as social media marketing or PPC), in order compare the results and see how well particular audiences respond to property listings. According to Calgary Listings, “This approcah not only shows which methods of marketing generate more property sales overall, but also how quickly each ‘type’ of lead will finalize a deal.”
Discovering Your Cost Per Lead
The overall cost per lead is one of the most understated elements of digital marketing, yet it’s the most important number on any analytics report. Although the figure will naturally fluctuate, by monitoring buyer journeys through closed-loop data, you’ll be able to determine exactly which marketing techniques are having the greatest impact on your business.
To discover your true overall cost per lead, calculate your business’s monthly costs: marketing, salaries, software licenses, advertising, premises—literally anything required for the general upkeep of your business. Then calculate the number of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) that you acquire each month, and divide the first number by the second. The resulting figure is your overall cost per lead. As you refine your marketing strategy this figure should get lower and lower.
It’s the marriage of all this data that makes digital analytics so powerful. While most people who use standard web analytics tend to focus on whether or not a particular marketing method works/doesn’t work, digital analytics helps improve and optimize a campaign by helping you find out why something works/doesn’t work.