Tracking Your Success: A Guide to Digital Analytics
By: Lucas D’Orazio
What are Digital Analytics?
Statistics drive very many things in different fields. In sports, coaches look at their team’s on-field statistics to determine what is working best for their team in order to win. In sales, business owners analyze what sales strategies work the best for them to make more money. Producers of movies and TV look at the statistics of how many people consume their product and who those people are. Content creation and digital marketing is no different. People want to look at the statistics behind the things they are putting hours of work into to make sure it is as successful as possible. This is where Digital Analytics comes in. Using sites like Google Analytics can help you look at what different practices you use work best to achieve whatever your online goal is.
What to Look For in Digital Analytics
When starting a campaign that you are going to analyze, you first have to decide what your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are going to be. This is where you decide exactly what you want to get out of your hard work on a specific campaign. Some examples of popular KPIs are:
More traffic (visitors, unique visitors)
More social media followers (likes, followers)
More social media engagement (likes, shares, retweets, repins, swipes, clicks)
More earned media (news and influencer shares/coverage)
More leads (form fills, phone calls, inquiries, store visits)
More Sales (purchase)
Customer retention/loyalty (repeat visits, purchases)
Different campaigns call for different KPIs, and you can determine what KPI fits your campaign best.
What Else Can I Track?
Digital Analytics has a vast majority of things to look at and see who is visiting your website. For example, “Gen Z,” is currently a very large demographic to market to (check out more on Marketing to Gen Z). You want to make sure your campaign is hitting your target demographic. Google Analytics and other analytics sites allow you to see the age range of different users on your site.
Mobile vs. desktop is another great digital analytics point to see what your visitors are using to view your site. Digital Analytics can help you see how well people react to your site on different devices (more on Mobile Marketing). Looking at bounce rate or time on site between different devices may give you a clue into your mobile sites accessibility or how easy it is to use.
Digital Analytics can give you a look into where your site visitors are coming from as well. This can be very important when trying to promote a business locally, or get more people to engage in a community event (more on Community Engagement). This gives you a great idea of where your visitors come from, and that can help you decide what else you can market to them based on their location.
Another important thing to track using Digital Analytics is what channels your traffic is coming through. This could include people searching for your site individually through a search engine (an organic search), or whether they received a link to your site through an email or text message, or whether your social media platforms brought them in (more on Social Media Trends). Using a campaign URL builder, you can create different URL’s for different platforms that you use in order to track where visitors came to your site from (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). This enables you to note what social media platforms have the strongest following for you, or what different posting tactics work best for you.
Terms to Know in Digital Analytics / Statistics to Look At
Users - Users is the amount of people who visited your site over a certain time period.
Sessions - A session is one visit to your website. One user often times can have multiple sessions, which means they returned to your site after an initial visit.
Bounce Rate - This is a metric that helps determine what a user does when they are on your site. If a user does not click on a “read more” tab, or another link on the site, or any other content on that site it contributes to a high bounce rate. A bounce rate of 100% means that your users did not engage with your site any more than their initial visit.
Session Duration - The average session duration is how long people stayed on your site with their visit. Anything around or more than 2-3 minutes is a good session duration, especially on mobile devices, in which people are more inclined to exit quickly from a site (higher bounce rate).
Pages per Session - This is a ratio of how many pages on your website someone engages with to each individual visit, or session. This is another number that contributes to bounce rate.
Here is an example of this sites Google Analytics. Notice the amounts of users, sessions average session duration, and bounce rate.
Here is a video that gives a basic rundown of specifically Google Analytics and how it works.
Recap
Digital Analytics are a huge factor in the success of your online campaign. What’s the point of putting all that work into a project if you aren’t even going to look to see how it did, and also take note on how to improve future projects and campaigns. You’re the coach of your team, your team being the campaigns you create and put out, and you definitely have something to gain from looking at the statistics of what your content is doing for you and your brand!
Sources
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/data-and-measurement/
Nahai, N. (2017). Webs of influence: The psychology of online persuasion. Pearson Education Limited.
https://www.nielsen.com/eu/en/solutions/capabilities/media-analytics/
https://yoast.com/understanding-bounce-rate-google-analytics/
https://moz.com/learn/seo/digital-analytics-people-process-platform-mozcon-2015