People often consider data analytics and digital marketing as two separate domains, although one has become an inseparable part of the other. In this article, we will discuss the unseen connection between digital marketing and data analysis.
Why Digital Marketing Alone Falls Short
Digital marketing is a subfield of marketing that leverages the internet and digital media and technologies to promote products and services.
Although digital marketing is a dynamic and diverse field in its own right, it still suffers from a unique set of challenges that the field cannot cope with on its own. Nowadays, measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing has become one of biggest challenges faced by organizations.
HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound report found that 42% of marketers cited proving the ROI of marketing campaigns as one of their greatest challenges today. Unsurprisingly, several brands reported that they planned to increase their spending on digital analytics between 75 and 100% in the coming years.
Despite the overwhelming need of digital analytics, many marketers don’t understand what it really means. Most of them associate its metrics related to web analytics such as bounce rates, unique visitors, and traffic. When in reality, web analytics only encompasses a fraction of data analytics.
Although web analytics gives users a wealth of data and insight into the performance of their website, marketers require more in-depth understanding of data to understand how their marketing campaigns influence the buyer’s journey and conversion rates. Therefore, metrics such as traffic and conversion rates are merely the first piece of the puzzle.
Enters: Digital Marketing Analytics
Marketing techniques used in industry transcend the bounds traditional metrics of evaluating website performance. To improve the results of our strategies, we need to analyze what happens between our marketing channels, as well as the outcomes that happen based on our marketing initiatives.
Digital marketing analytics is in many ways an intersection between digital marketing and data analytics. The purpose of this domain is to measure business metrics such as leads, traffic, and sales, and identify the correlation between online events and lead conversions.
Leveraging Digital Marketing Analytics in the Age of Data
A digital marketing analytics strategy, if managed well, delivers powerful insights that not only transform the website’s performance but also identifies various weaknesses in the previous marketing strategy. However, many digital marketers either fail to do things in the right order or attempt too many things at one time.
To avoid such mistakes, you can follow a data-centric strategy based on three simple steps. These steps are capturing, analyzing, and interpreting all data related to your website. However, to fully leverage digital marketing analytics, it’s essential to include data not only from your website but also from other sources such as social media, online PR, and email.
Using this approach helps marketers compare each of their marketing initiatives pit their performance against one another, making it easier to determine the real ROI of their campaigns.
In the end, the insights and information derived from digital marketing analytics, allows marketers to diagnose inefficiencies in particular channels of their marketing tools. At the same time, it enables marketers to adjust their tactics and strategies to enhance their overall marketing output.