Analytics

Back to: The Bite-Sized Guide to Digital Marketing 101

In order to measure how successful your digital marketing strategy is, understanding the analytics available to you is a priority.

So what exactly are analytics?

Analytics are the data which tells you how successful your digital marketing content is ie it monitors how the public interacts (or does not interact) with your posts, emails, and website.

Website Analytics

Most website hosts will now include the use of an analytics tool like Google Analytics. Examining the output of your analytics can help tremendously with both, understanding if your website is meeting its goals and trouble-shooting if it is not.

Some of the data Google Analytics gives is:

• How many site visits (ie hits) are received within a given period
• What keywords are used
• Where your website viewers are from
• Which page they go to first, and next, and next
• How long they stay on each page
• How long they stay on the site as a whole
• What links they click and what they ignore
• What the most popular page is
• Whether your viewers are on a mobile device or a PC
• Potentially, other demographic information about your users

Social Media Analytics

The data available on social media platforms tends to vary according to which platform is being used. Some, like Facebook, have very pronounced analytics, others, like Snapchat have very little. However, more third party applications are being produced now (like Hootsuite) that will monitor all your social media platforms and give you a breakdown of analytics in one place.

The sort of things monitored by these apps are:

• Number of new followers, likers, friends etc
• Number of lost followers, likers, friends etc
• Posts that received the most interaction ie likes, shares, retweets
• Most popular times of day/night to post in terms of increased activity
• Number of times url links are clicked within posts

Email Marketing Analytics

If you manage and maintain your own email list, the data you can access is limited. For example, you can manually monitor the amount of interaction the email generates by manually recording how much response you get to it. You can also monitor whether any in-email links to your website get clicked by watching your website analytics closely.  However, if you use an application like MailChimp to manage your email list, you will get a lot more information from the integrated analytics.

The sort of data you can receive is:

• Email open rate
• Link click rate
• Number of subscribers/unsubscribers
• Bounce rate ie the number of “bad” email addresses to which your email is not delivered successfully
• Number of times an email is forwarded to another email account