The ability to accurately measure your campaigns' right metrics and KPIs is crucial for evaluating your marketing performance. In this post, you'll learn how to start with digital marketing analytics.
What Are Digital Marketing Analytics, And Why Are They Important?
Digital marketing analytics refers to the process of gathering and analyzing data from online channels like websites, PPC platforms, and social media networks to understand how users interact with digital content.
The insights gained from the analysis help marketers make data-driven decisions to improve the performance of their digital marketing campaigns.
For example, when sending a weekly email newsletter and measuring your campaigns' open and click rates, you can evaluate what type of content resonates with your audience.
Why are digital analytics important?
Digital marketing analytics are crucial because not knowing your campaigns' performance is like driving with your eyes closed. With digital analytics, you can:
- Evaluate which content performs best.
- Calculate the Return On Investment (ROI) for each channel.
- Calculate your digital ads' CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per action).
- Analyze the performance of individual campaigns.
- Measure metrics to help with strategic decisions.
- Create reports and dashboards to inform key stakeholders.
- Compare the performance of your marketing between different periods.
What Metrics (KPIs) Should You Measure?
Each online channel has a set of unique KPIs for measuring performance. From experience, if you try to monitor all digital marketing metrics, you'll get lost in the reports and lose track of each campaign's main goal.
Instead, you should concentrate on a few KPIs per channel. The most useful are:
Website Traffic Metrics - Website traffic metrics include metrics from Google Analytics, such as the number of visits (users), sessions, engaged sessions, average time per session, views, bounce rate, and engagement rate.
SEO Metrics - these include metrics related to your performance in Google. Your search engine rankings, organic traffic, views, and organic CTR can help you evaluate your SEO strategy. The Google Search Console is the most accurate source, but you can combine data with Google Analytics and third-party tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
PPC Metrics - When running PPC campaigns like Google Ads, you should focus on six KPIs: conversion rate, interaction rate, interactions, average CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition), and quality score.
Social Media Metrics - For paid social media marketing campaigns like Facebook Ads, you should monitor metrics related to the performance of ads, such as ad reach, ad impressions, CTR, conversions, and CPA.
Email Marketing Metrics - The most critical metrics for email marketing campaigns are open rate and click rate. These will give you a strong indication of your emails' effectiveness and whether recipients like your content. To protect your domain's reputation and avoid your email landing in users' spam folders, you should also monitor bounce rates and complaints rates.
How To Practically Use Digital Marketing Analytics?
When you know which metrics to track, the next step is to embed analytics into your digital marketing strategy. Let's see how to do this.
1. Set SMART Goals For Each Campaign
First, you need to set clear and measurable goals for each campaign. These goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. In marketing, these are known as SMART goals.
This step is crucial because your objectives guide what metrics you should monitor in your analytics. Here are a couple of examples of smart digital marketing goals.
- Increase organic traffic by 20% in the next 24 months.
- Increase email engagement rate by 0.5% in the next 3 months.
- Reduce Facebook Ads CPC below $2.
Then, you should decide which specific metrics to measure for each goal. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, focus on metrics like visits and page views.
If your goal is to reduce Google Ads Costs, you should measure quality score, average CPC, and conversion rate.
2. Consolidate Data
From experience, one of the biggest problems with marketing analytics is that the metrics are widespread on different platforms, making it difficult to monitor. You should consolidate data on a single platform to make your life easier. Consolidation allows you to collect data across different channels in one place, making it easier to analyze and compare performance across campaigns.
My recommended tool is Google Looker Studio. It's free and can be integrated with many platforms, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads. With Looker Studio, you can easily create reports and nice dashboards and share them with your team.
3. Measure Your Current Performance
Once you have your dashboards and reports, the next step is to take a snapshot of your current performance. Before running any digital marketing campaign, you should take note of your chosen metrics so that you'll have something to benchmark future efforts.
For example, before executing a new SEO campaign to improve your rankings for specific keywords, use Google Search Console data and record your current rankings, views, and organic visits for the particular keywords. As the campaign is running, compare the results to see if there is a positive or negative effect.
For these tasks, you can use a line graph (it's very easy to do in Looker Studio) to spot upward or downward trends easily without going deeper into the analysis.
Pro Tip: Many platforms have a data retention period, after which the data is deleted from their systems. For example, Google Search Console's retention period is 16 months, and Google Analytics's is 26 months. As marketers, we need as much historical data as possible for many reasons.
That's why you should remember to either export the data regularly and import it into a custom-made system or use Google Sheets to record all the important metrics monthly.
4. Monitor Your Progress
Monitor your selected KPIs regularly to track progress toward your goals. Don't just set them and forget about them. Digital marketing is dynamic, so you need to be alert and ready to adjust your strategies based on the analytics you're seeing.
Regular monitoring can also help you identify critical issues with your campaigns. Here are some real-life examples we encountered recently.
One of our clients had issues with their email provider, and people could not subscribe to their email list. By monitoring the email signups daily, we could spot and solve this.
Another client's website was hacked, and the content on certain pages was filled with spam, negatively impacting their ranking positions. Although the website has thousands of pages, our automated ranking reports identified the unusual drop, and we could resolve the issue without further damaging the brand's reputation.
5. Analyze Data
In addition to monitoring, you should analyze the data to uncover insights and trends. Analysis means looking beyond the numbers and identifying patterns and opportunities for optimization.
For example, if you're analyzing your website's traffic data and notice that certain blog posts have significantly higher engagement rates than others, this is valuable insight. It means that the topics or formats of these particular posts resonate more with your audience.
Upon further analysis, you might discover that these high-performing posts all address specific "how-to" questions or include video content. This pattern indicates an opportunity for optimization: you can focus on creating more content with the same characteristics, i.e., tutorial-style posts and how-to videos.
Similarly, if your data shows that a significant portion of your traffic comes from mobile devices, but your mobile bounce rate is also high, this could indicate that your website isn't fully optimized for mobile users.
The opportunity here would be to invest in mobile SEO to improve the user experience. This could potentially lead to more engagement with your content and increased conversions from mobile visitors.
6. Adjust Your Strategy
Everything you have done so far will be meaningless if you don't act on your findings. By action, we mean adjusting your strategies and marketing goals so that you can achieve your business objectives.
For example, if your reports show that money spent on Google Ads returns a higher profit than Facebook Ads, reallocating your budget to Google Ads will generate more profit for your business.
Always remember that your job as a marketer is not to meet your marketing goals but to satisfy the business's financial goals, even if this means changing your plans.
The ultimate goal of digital marketing analytics is to collect data and derive actionable insights that can generate better business outcomes. Regularly reviewing and acting on your analytics will ensure your digital marketing efforts are effective and aligned with your business goals.
In my experience, successful marketers make data-driven decisions and are ready to take action based on what the analytics tell them.
How To Learn Digital Marketing Analytics
So far, you have read an overview of digital marketing analytics and how it works.
Learning digital marketing analytics effectively requires following a structured approach that includes the theory, i.e., what metrics to measure, and practice, i.e., how to measure them.
Here's a step-by-step roadmap for beginners.
1. Understand How Digital Marketing Works
Before getting into analytics, you need to have a good understanding of the basics of digital marketing. You need to know how the various channels (SEO, PPC, social media, email) work and which metrics to track for each channel.
You can use the following resources:
- Digital marketing courses - a list of free and paid courses suitable for beginners.
- Digital Marketing Full Course - a complete course to learn how the different components of digital marketing work. It includes a dedicated course on digital marketing analytics.
- How to learn digital marketing - a free guide for getting into digital marketing without prior experience.
2. Learn How To Use Analytics Tools
Get hands-on experience with the most popular digital marketing analytics tools. Start with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Looker Studio, as they are widely used and free. Learn how to navigate their interface, create reports, and export data for consolidation.
Use the following resources:
- Google Search Console - a free guide for beginners to GSC. It includes step-by-step instructions and many examples.
- Google Analytics Courses - This includes the official courses from Google Analytics Academy and other online courses you can use to master Google Analytics.
- Google Looker Studio Guide - If you're not familiar with Looker Studio, this Google guide will help you get started.
3. Practice On Your Own Properties Or Sample Projects
The only way to understand digital analytics is to practice a lot. If you can access a website or digital marketing campaign, practice setting goals, tracking conversions, creating reports, and analyzing user behavior.
If possible, start your own blog, website, or e-commerce project. This allows you to apply digital marketing and analytics skills in a real-world scenario, experiment with different strategies, and see the results firsthand.
Google Analytics has a demo account, which is useful if you don't have your own properties.
4. Learn From Experts
YouTube is a great source for learning data analytics. Analytics Mania is a channel dedicated to teaching Google Analytics, and it's definitely worth following. You will learn a lot of practical tricks you can not find in a course.
Workshops and webinars can provide up-to-date industry insights and practical advice from professionals. They often cover the latest trends and how to use analytics tools to address common marketing challenges.
Following these steps can help you develop a strong foundation in digital marketing analytics. Remember, blending theoretical knowledge with as much practical experience as possible is key.
What To Do Next?
If you decide to get involved professionally with data analysis, you can take it a step further and become a data analyst or a data scientist. Even if you don't have a related degree, you can pursue a professional certification from Google, IBM, Microsoft, and other companies and build the credentials needed to apply for data analytics jobs.
These jobs are high in demand, and they offer good salaries for beginners. Use the following resources to learn more.
