In today’s digital age most marketers seek to measure their digital efforts through analytics. From unique visitors to social media followers, it is important to set short and long-term objective to boost their return on investment. The analytics behind digital media has always been one of the advantages of digital over traditional media. However, many companies shy away from investing in analytics to improve their return on investment for several reasons including lack of time and budget.
The real challenge lies not in finding data but in interpreting what the data means. Alexander Rauser, CEO of Prototype, a Dubai-based digital agency specialised in designing and developing interactive solutions, elaborates on understanding the analytics behind digital data to boost ROI.
1) Ask Questions
The reality is that even the most basic digital marketing programme is way more complex. An organisations digital programme may consist of a website, social media, SEM, digital banners, or event email marketing. You would want to know which channel acquires best results, which channel demands optimisation and more importantly, which channel is wasting your money. The best way to analyse digital data is to ask questions. The questions you ask will lead you to important insights, which in turn will point you towards the right data you should be focusing on.
The following questions can serve as a guiding tool to help understand the benefits of digital data for your brand and its ROI:
• Which products are sold the most? This can be tracked by actual sales reports.
• Who are the users that buy these products? Tracked by demographic info of the users that generated a conversion. These numbers will be predominantly depicted by graphs, tables or pie-charts.
• Is there potential to sell more of these products? This is determined by researching online search volume and user behaviour.
• Which marketing channels are contributing the most towards making a sale? Identified by looking at referrals and traffic sources as well as combining analytics data from multiple channels.
• What’s the conversion rate? Determined by analysing your traffic, ads and click-throughs vs actual conversion.
2) Trial and error
Follow questions with trial and error experimentation that may include increasing or decreasing ad spend or re-evaluating and changing target audience options. Doing analytics right means to reverse the actual measurement process by starting at your core objectives, asking the right questions, finding the data and then creating experiments to validate and improve your results step by step.
3) Measuring outcomes
There is a wealth of data and customer information, especially with the spread of the web, social media, and mobile. The plethora of data sources means that you can mine this fertile data to truly accelerate your company’s revenues. Measuring what matters definitively results in extra effort but understanding the statistics of your digital plan is a surefire way to reap the benefits of your brand’s digital programme.
