Accurately collecting, analyzing and using marketing data is an obstacle to many marketers and decision makers. The right data collection and digital marketing data analysis techniques can provide invaluable insights about your business; it can show you where your dollars are best spent, what your customers are responding to, and how and when your marketing efforts turn into sales. The right digital marketing data analysis strategy can give your business a competitive edge.
The 4-Step Marketing Data Analysis Strategy To Drive Business Growth
1. Define a Problem
First, you must know what you want to accomplish or what problem you want to solve. This will show you what digital marketing data you need to track and how you need to analyze it. Tracking the wrong data or conducting the wrong digital marketing data analysis will lead you to incorrect assumptions. Similarly, making decisions without data will prevent you from moving forward in a measurable way.
Ask yourself what you want to know or what problem you want to solve. At this stage, it’s okay to be general, but your problem should have a KPI attached to it. This might be leads, brand awareness, sales, conversion rates, or ROI.
With this example, we’ll go through each step in the digital marketing data analysis process to solve a problem.
You are a marketing manager and you’ve decided to take a hard look at your website. You feel like your website is underperforming, and you want to generate more leads from it.
2. Set Data-Driven Goals
With your problem and objective defined, a measurable goal will help you determine if you’re moving in the right direction. Digital marketing data analysis must be based on goals and benchmarks to give the numbers any meaning. Your goals should be based on previous digital marketing data analysis, or other benchmarks you’ve gathered. The goals you set should be difficult to reach, but possible.
To adjust your goals accordingly, determine the level of performance you would need to accomplish them. This will help you get specific. From here, you can determine what you would have to improve and by how much to reach a certain goal.
Previously, you’ve determined from your web analytics that your best landing page generates 13,000 visitors a month, and 130 leads, with a lead conversion rate of 1%. In this case, you decide improving lead conversions makes more sense than improving traffic. Previously, you’ve doubled conversion rates on similar pages simply by optimizing the page load speed, however no landing page has a conversion rate higher than 5%. From this, you determine how many leads you’ll need to meet a challenging goal.
Goal Leads Lead Conversion Rate % Improvement Current Status 130 1% N/A Minimum Goal 260 2% 100% Challenging Goal 520 4% 300% Improbable Goal 780 6% 500%
3. Collect Accurate Data
To generate the right conclusion and to focus on the right improvements, your digital marketing data analysis tools must be reliable. The data you receive should also be easy to interpret.
To gather data accurately, you will need a way to track user behavior. The right codes, URLs, or plugins can show you how a user arrived on the page, what they clicked, or whether or not they saw an ad. These tracking codes may include a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet, URL tracking codes, Facebook Pixel, or HotJar plugin, among others. When using these tracking devices, make sure you set events properly, so the device knows what to track. Google Analytics’ code snippets, for example, may need to be set up to track conversion events.
Once your tracking devices are installed and events are set up, you’ll need to integrate them with a data gathering or compilation platform so you can assess your digital marketing data analysis strategy. For this, you may need to integrate your website and analytics tools with a CRM system like Hubspot. Or you may prefer to use a data compilation platform like Data Box or Google Data Studio.
When assessing the performance of your landing page, you notice that conversion rates dipped the last two months. To make sure you have accurate data, you talk to your web design team about the Google Analytics tracking code. You determine that a recently installed chatbot interfered with the tracking code. The design team fixes this problem, and you test the code to make sure your conversion events are tracking properly.
You realize there’s still an issue; your sales team hasn’t seen any of the leads from the new landing pages. You know some of the leads generated must be sales-qualified, so you suspect an issue between your marketing and sales CRM systems. Sure enough, you see that the leads marketing determined to be sales-qualified were being delivered to the wrong regional salesperson due to a CRM system error.
Lastly, to get a full picture of page performance, you add your Google Analytics and CRM system reports to Data Studio. You build a custom report to look at the landing page you’re working on, and you get an easy-to-read chart showing traffic, traffic types, clicks, conversions, leads, marketing qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, and more.
4. Make Informed Changes
To achieve your goals, you need to decide what to change and how to change it. At this stage, you’ll want to hypothesize changes based on previous digital marketing data analysis or other estimates. Use A/B testing or user testing and study the results individually and gauge the impact of each change.
Improving the loading speed of other landing pages has doubled their conversion rates in the past. Though you’re reasonably sure this will be the case again, you make this change first and study the results so the improved conversion rates from the speed upgrades don’t affect the other changes you’ll make.
As you expected, the conversion rates doubled after the speed upgrade and are now at 2%. Next, you suspect that making the form on the page shorter and adding an explanatory video to the page will improve it further. You conduct an A/B test to first test your form hypothesis. It turns out to be correct; conversion rates improve to 3%. Then you conduct another A/B test for the video. This is also correct; conversion rates improve from the original 2% to 3%. Finally, you make both the changes together and, just as you expected, you’ve reached 4%!
This may seem like a long process for improving one landing page, however you’ve done more than that: you’ve made a framework for uncovering problems across your site and solving them using facts, not guesses. For each objective you target however, it’s also important to determine the time and resources you can give to it. If you lack the tools, time, or experience to apply marketing data analysis to your goals, a digital marketing agency can work through the process for you. With this you can reliably resolve obstacles holding back your digital marketing strategy, without taking time away from your other business goals.
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