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Marketing managers and their teams have access to an abundance of data which never ceases to increase. Marketing surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, customer data and the data generated by social networks each provide extensive information. And of course, web analytics is also a significant source of rich data.

Why should marketers examine this data? What types of useful information can digital marketers glean? In this article, we’ll examine how digital analytics data can address two major concerns of marketers.

Who are my potential customers?

For digital marketers, there’s one essential need that lays the foundation for all successful marketing actions: a greater understanding of their potential customers.

One of the marketing team’s tasks is to find the right message which will trigger user action, such as sign-up, contact, or adding products to a shopping basket. To find this effective message, marketers must know their users’ needs, expectations and state of mind, and must also be able to place themselves in their shoes.

In order to do so, online marketers need information on visitors’ habits, motivations and fears. Of course, each user is different, but certain universal traits can characterise a site’s visitors. With this knowledge at hand, it then becomes possible to effectively communicate with these visitors and optimise results.

Quantitative data generated by digital analytics tools are of precious help. Digital analytics provides information about your audience which can be used to your advantage, including their areas of interest, browsing habits, bottlenecks, preferences, and more. Some key things to examine with digital analytics are:

  • Keywords used in your internal search engines. This highlights the problems and concerns that your potential customers would like to solve.
  • Performance indicators of ads or landing pages. This will tell you what attracts your target market. Which messages are most effective? Messaging about price, ease of use, customer service, or the security of a transaction?
  • Traffic comparisons by site section or category. This reveals your audience’s preferences.
  • Articles read on your blog, and the traffic generated from these posts to your product pages. This will tell you where in the purchasing process your potential customers are – either at the start as they begin to discover a product, or at the end of the cycle, where they are about to choose the company from which they want to buy.
  • Pageviews of Terms and Conditions pages, or Return Policy pages. This will tell you to what degree your customers are seeking information on risk aversion.

Collecting all of this quantitative data allows you to create personas for marketing purposes. User actions and behaviours provide important information which can be used to determine the profiles of potential customers. All that remains is to create the message and personal experience which can be used to persuade each profile to make a purchase.

How can I improve my marketing actions?

Marketers have their own ideas about the performance of their actions. Their evaluation is often based on their intuition, and their experience and tends to lead to the following conclusion: They have done their best and it is not possible to do any better. However, their competitors are gaining more ground in the market, existing customers are not making additional purchases, advertising costs are increasing considerably, and budgets are frozen…

The good news in all of this is that it’s always possible to improve the performance of a web site’s pages, of campaigns and actions undertaken on social networks. Digital analytics data is there to help you, as it reveals the exact location of poor performances and blocking points on a site.

Let’s take the example of an email campaign whose results are much lower than expected.

The data will allow you to answer the following questions:

  • Was the email campaign opened?
  • Was the email campaign clicked?
  • Was the campaign’s destination page clicked?
  • Were there any converted visits from the campaign?
  • When exactly and on what page did recipients of the email campaign leave your site?

The analyses favour a wider understanding of the reasons behind the email campaign’s poor performance. You will find out whether the poor performance is associated with the subject of the campaign, its content, the content of the landing page, product page, or if there is a discrepancy between a promise that may have been stated on the email campaign and the offer that is actually available on the site.

This data can be used to refine and improve a campaign’s content, placements, and sending frequency. Thanks to this information, marketers can more efficiently manage the following activities:

  • Advertising and email campaigns, as well as sponsored links
  • SEO actions and positioning a company on search engines
  • Social network campaigns
  • Producing content on sites such as blogs, white papers, videos
  • Self-promotion campaigns (house ads) promoting products on your own site
  • Merchandising, promoting merchandise on your internal search engines
  • Customer loyalty campaigns

Analysing this data may also lead to the conclusion that a particular marketing action must be stopped, especially if it does not generate the expected results, despite the different adjustments made.

Let’s consider a second example with a display campaign on a publisher network. Despite adjusting your campaign settings to only display ads on a restricted number of targeted content sites, the level of traffic generated is quite low. This type of advertising needs to be stopped. The budget dedicated to this type of advertising can therefore be redistributed to other campaigns, such as a paid search campaign, where the quality of traffic generated is superior.

Even if you think your website content, campaign content and landing pages meet the needs and expectations of users, and even if you respect the best practices used in the marketing community, there is always room for improvement to better engage your users.

Where can I find these opportunities? Digital analytics holds the keys!

Want help in transforming your digital analytics data into concrete insights and recommendations for action? Our business analytics consultants can help. Contact us to learn more!

 

Article originally published in September, 2012.

Author

Head of Client Success – Generaleads Benoit has a master’s degree in Economics from the University of Bordeaux and 10 years of web analytics experience developed while at AT Internet. In early 2015, Benoit joined the Google AdWords specialist agency GENERALEADS as Head of Client Success. In parallel, he’s working on the start-up GetLandy, the first landing page creation tool designed for traffic managers.

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