eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Marketing in a Digital World Data Analytics What you’ll learn How to set solid objectives, goals and measurements for your digital marketing campaigns How to capture web analytics data, and what data you can find Techniques and guidelines for analysing data to better understand your web visitors

Working with data Assumptions and gut feel are not enough – you need to back these up with solid facts and clear results Data concepts: Performance monitoring and trends Big data Data mining

Data can be gathered from a variety of sources Online data Databases Software data App store Offline data

Setting objectives, goals and KPIs . The key to success for any website or online campaign is designing it with specific, unique, clearly defined objectives in mind. These are used to measure the success of the website or campaign, and are crucial to maintaining focus within online activities

What are objectives, goals and KPIs? The objective of a website or online campaign expresses the strategic outcomes of the business

What are objectives, goals and KPIs? The goal of a website or campaign in web analytics refers to an action that a user takes on a website or a type of user behaviour

What are objectives, goals and KPIs? Key performance indicators or KPIs are metrics that are used to indicate whether objectives are being met

What are objectives, goals and KPIs? For example: Objective – Increase the number of email newsletter subscribers by 10% in the next six months Goal – subscribe to newsletter by filling out the web form KPI – number of subscriptions

Tracking and collecting data How information is captured: Cookie-based tracking Server-based tracking Universal analytics

Tracking and collecting data How information is captured: Cookie-based tracking Most common currently Page tags are implemented in the website code Reports on events and rich user interactions Provides detailed, customisable reports

Tracking and collecting data How information is captured: Server-based tracking Raw data is produced by the server in log files Very accurate Cannot capture events and site interactions

Tracking and collecting data How information is captured: Universal analytics Tracks users, not browsers Investigate long-term user interactions Determine lifetime value Import offline data

What types of information are captured? Web analytics metrics are divided into: Counts – simple numbers Ratios – comparisons between two data points

What types of information are captured? Metrics can be applied to three different groupings: Aggregate – all traffic Segmented – a subset of traffic filtered according to a specific characteristic Individual – a single visitor

How much traffic your website is receiving? Hit Page Page view Visit or session Unique visitor New visitor (first visit to site) Returning visitor (visited the site before)

How are visitors reaching your website? How they move through the website Entry page Landing page Exit page Visit duration Referrer Clickthrough Clickthrough rate Page views per visit

How do visitors react to your content? Page exit ratio Single page visits Bounces Bounce rate

Are you achieving your analytics goals? Event – a recorded action that has a specific time assigned to it by the browser or the server Conversion – a visitor completing a target action

Mobile data There are no special, new or different metrics to use. You will probably be focusing your attention on some key aspects like technologies and the user experience Device category Mobile device info Mobile input selector Operating system

Analysing data Track – Analyse – Optimise A number is just a number until you can interpret it. Analyse trends and changes over time to understand your brand’s performance.

Key elements to analyse Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, recommends a three-pronged approach to web analytics 1. Analysing behaviour data infers the intent of a website’s visitors. Why are people visiting the website?

Key elements to analyse Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, recommends a three-pronged approach to web analytics 2. Analysing outcomes metrics shows how many visitors performed the goal actions on a website. Are visitors completing the goals we want them to?

Key elements to analyse Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, recommends a three-pronged approach to web analytics 3. A wide range data tells us about the user experience. What are the patterns of user behaviour? How can we influence them so that we achieve our objectives? .

Web users’ behaviour can indicate a lot about their intent Looking at referral URLs and search terms used to find the website can tell you a great deal about what problems visitors are expecting your site to solve A crucial, often-overlooked part of this analysis is internal search. Internal search refers to the searches of the website’s content that users perform on the website. While a great deal of time is spent analysing and optimising external search – using search engines to reach the website in question – analysing internal search goes a long way to exposing weaknesses in site navigation, determining how effectively a website is delivering solutions to visitors, and finding gaps in inventory on which a website can capitalise.

Methods to gauge user intent 1. Click density analysis Use heat maps to analyse number and location of clicks. Where on the page are people clicking most often? Are there any groups of clicks in important areas?

Heat maps Show you exactly where users click on a web page, regardless of whether they are clicking on links or not It produces information that helps you to know which areas of a website are clickable, but attract few or no clicks, and which areas are not clickable but have users attempting to click there.

Methods to gauge user intent 2. Segmentation Segment users into groups based on common characteristics. Do specific sub-sections of the audience behave in a certain way? How do aspects like time, devices, pages viewed, etc. affect this? .

Segmentation Every visitor to a website is different, but there are some ways in which we can characterise groups of users, and analyse metrics for each group Segments include: Referral source Landing pages and content Connection speed, operating system, browser, device Geographical location New vs. returning visitors .

Methods to gauge user intent 3. Behaviour and content metrics Look at behaviour figures and content consumed. Do users who spend more time on site act differently to those who bounce? What do different content types tell you about user intent? .

Outcomes You want people who visit your website to perform an action that increases your revenue Analysing goals and KPIs indicates where there is room for improvement Look at user intent to establish if your website meets the users’ goals, and if these match with the website goals. Look at user experience to determine how outcomes can be influenced

User experience In order to determine the factors that influence user experience, you must test and determine the patterns of user behaviour. Understanding why users behave in a certain way on your website will show you how that behaviour can be influenced to improve your outcomes

Advantages Easy and fast tracking The ability to optimise frequently Use real data to make decisions, so you’re likely to make the best choices for your business and website

Challenges It can be easy to become fixated on figures and metrics, instead of looking at broader trends and using them to optimise campaigns. Generally, macro or global metrics should be looked at before analysing micro elements of a website

Doing it right: Motoreasy Motoreasy puts their broad marketing activities to good use by improving the conversion rate on their website and increasing business four-fold

What happened? Key insights: Once these changes were implemented, the dropout rate for the first part of the process fell from 65 per cent to 29 per cent Key insights: Looking at the drop-off rate at each stage in the conversion funnel was important to identify problems A high drop-off rate across the conversion funnel could highlight a general problem with the process itself It was important to direct visitors by spelling out the action they should complete while clearly and consistently communicating the benefits of doing so. This would motivate them to complete the conversion funnel (Dainow, n.d.)

That’s all folks You can also read about: User Experience Design , Web Development and Design, Writing for Digital, CRM, SEO, Search Advertising, Online Advertising, Affiliate Marketing , Video Marketing, Social Media Channels, Social Media Strategy, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Data Analytics and Conversion Optimisation.