Web Analytics, Should you even care?
Web analytics provides a means to measure and report on the performance of your digital marketing efforts. Most importantly, it empowers you with the essential insights to make informed decisions to optimise your digital marketing strategy.
But do you have to care?
Imagine driving a car without a dashboard display unit. How will you know if you have enough fuel for a journey? How can you tell if something in the engine requires urgent attention? How can you see how fast you are driving or how much mileage the car has clocked?
There will be no way to tell.
As you can agree, a car’s dashboard provides you with critical information so that you can make decisions or act.
Without the dashboard, many drivers will find themselves in situations like being stuck in the middle of a journey with an empty tank because they had no way to tell if the car had enough fuel.
Similarly, web analytics or digital marketing analytics is equally important to anyone owning a website or running any digital marketing campaigns. Without analytics, you will have no data to guide your decisions, and without reporting, you will have no window to look into the inner happenings of your digital marketing strategy.
And more similarly, without web analytics, you will end up with a failing website or digital marketing campaign, without knowing how to turn things around.
If you own a website, or you are responsible for managing one, or you employ any form of digital marketing, analytics and reporting should always be part of your strategy and toolkit.
Importance of Web Analytics
The car dashboard analogy in the earlier section has indicated the importance of web analytics and why anyone employing any form of digital marketing should never ignore analytics and reporting.
Marketing is basically all about communication. Communication to build top of mind awareness amongst your ideal customers about the product or offer. The better you understand your prospects, the better you can craft a message targeting them. And the better you understand your tools. the better you can put them to use.
With digital marketing analytics, you will be able to get insights into prospects behaviours and the performance of your toolset. You will be ultimately empowered to market better.
Most importantly, remember digital marketing is data-driven. Any decisions you make or actions you take, whether it is about your website, a social media post or your next campaign, need to be data-informed.
Furthermore, web analytics will enable you to determine how much business value your marketing efforts are contributing. Powered by analytics you can even get more returns out of your marketing budget. You can also save yourself from wasting marketing budget on campaigns that are not working.
Digital marketing analytics will enable you to analyse and report on almost every aspect of your digital marketing campaigns. However, you need to pick your metrics based on your business goals. At the onset, your marketing strategy should align the KPIs to be tracked to the ultimate business goals.
Some examples for using analytics include, but are not limited to the following:
Analysing your website’s performance
You can measure both the quantity and quality of traffic to your website as a whole and on a page-by-page basis.
You will be able to analyse how each of your pages is performing and identify which traffic sources bring in the most website sessions and converts more visitors to customers over time.
When you know which traffic sources are driving the most value, you can focus your marketing campaigns on the ones that matter.
Track user journey and behaviour
You can also track the complete customer lifecycle, from the first visit (interaction) to when they become a loyal customer.
You can create behavioural events to track actions taken on your website so you can understand visitors’ behaviour and trigger automation workflows.
Create detailed reports for each of your marketing channels
You can get detailed reports for all of your digital marketing assets, from website and landing pages to emails, blog posts, social media accounts, calls-to-action, and more.
You can then add any report to your dashboard to have your most critical metrics all in one place.
Level Up Your Digital Marketing With Analytics
As long as you or your organisation own a website or employ any form of digital marketing, web analytics is your best friend. Embrace it and supercharge your campaigns today.
Worried that you don’t have the skillset or time to do it, we are here for you.
Digital Marketing Malawi can help your business with the support and services you need to get started with web analytics.
Find out how we can help by contacting us online or WhatsApp us on +265 99 226 5658 today!