While the content on a website tells a story and hopefully one that connects with the target audience, the data procured from a website tells a story of its own.  When it comes to digital marketing, the story told through data is one that changes over time. The story told today most likely will not be the same story told in 6 months from now.

User behavior changes, Google algorithms change, and businesses hopefully grow and change. With these changes, it is important that your website utilizes data analytics like Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics. With data analytics, it is also imperative that you analyze your site metrics. Without analysis, data can be meaningless, virtually just numbers without any type of correlation or causation. Analysis holds the key to unlocking the full story that data provides.  

Why Data Matters

If your website is not generating the interest or revenue you were hoping for, data analysis can help uncover reasons why and offer insight into what changes need to be made. Similarly, if your social media accounts or marketing emails are not garnering a high CTR, data can help focus your marketing campaigns in a more constructive way.

Let’s say your website is eliciting a lot of sessions, but you aren’t converting goals as much as you would like. Data analysis can show things like:

• Demographics
  • Are you attracting the right demographic for your business?
• Scroll Tracking
  • Are users scrolling through the entire landing page or are they stopping only 25% through?
• User Flow
  • Do your users have a steep decline after the homepage or is it further in the buyer’s journey?
• Keyword Queries
  • Is there a decline in queries where you are not targeting certain keywords?

This is just a small sample of data that can help tell the story of who, what, where, when, and how. The more information you have, the better equipped you are to make effective changes to your website that will hopefully equate to better goal completions, conversion rates, etc.

The Importance of Data Analysis and Marketing Strategy

Unlike subjective things like what colors look best on a website or best logo design, data is objective. Objectivity becomes increasingly important, especially if multiple stakeholders are decision-makers for marketing campaigns and directives. Utilizing data to make informed marketing decisions can help create strategies that can be built upon and improve over time.

For example, for a spring focus, one stakeholder wants to target a product category that is notorious for generating low revenue year-round. They want to see if a focus can help revenue generation since they haven’t focused on it before, however, they need to convince the other stakeholders that this can be a long-term strategy for the company. How can data-driven insights help? It can help in several ways that include:

• Offer a baseline of metrics to compare month over month gains and losses
• Show where users are coming from that correlate to the specific category page(s) or products that will be focused on
• Show a contrast of what products/categories are performing at an optimal level versus the low performing categories
  • This also entails knowledge of a company’s buyers and industry vertical. If a company sells a product that is known to be difficult to sell in the industry overall, the lack of revenue generated from the product may not just be due to issues with website engagement.

Work Smarter, Not Harder with Ecreative

Unlike strategies like PPC which usually show results at a quicker rate, data analysis takes time. It involves not only dissecting data and parlaying it into delivering actionable results, but time to procure data. For a business that is just starting to utilize tools like Google Analytics or Tag Manager, this means it will take time to obtain enough data to create strategies from.

Let the experts at Ecreative take the guesswork out of data analysis. Contact us to discuss ways in which data driven insights can help you achieve your marketing goals and more in the upcoming year.