Winning the Digital Marketing Popularity Contest
Do I need digital marketing analytics? Are they important? Can they really help my business or organization? Yes, yes and definitely yes!
Analytics may seem daunting when you are looking at pages upon pages of numbers and data, especially for local government agencies and nonprofits who may not have dedicated personnel for digital communications strategies, but the deep dive that good analytics provides helps organizations understand how your business/website/ and social media are performing. By taking a look at each online platform and the analytics behind it, your organization can better improve audience engagement and use that information to formulate strategies to grow your business. Digital marketing analytics can be tracked for all digital channels that your organization uses, including your website, social media and your marketing emails to give deeper insight into your audience engagement on each of these platforms.
Google analytics can be one of the most useful tools for improving your communications strategies. According to Hootesuite google analytics can help you see which social media platforms give you the most traffic, see what content works best on your website, make sure that you’re attracting the right audience with demographic data, and see how many leads and other conversions your website generates. For municipalities, this data can show you which pages on your website are having the most traffic. For example, the most visited pages for municipal websites is usually trash and recycling. This means that this should have a presence on your homepage on your website so that users can easily access it.
In addition, Google Analytics has an entire section, Acquisition, devoted to providing you with information on how the visitors to your website found you. Google tracks how many people land on your website after clicking on a link in search results (organic results), how many people come from links shared on social media, from other websites, from paid ads, and by typing your website directly into search according to HostGator. A lot of traffic can come from your municipal monthly Newsletter to your website.
If you are looking for an in depth explanation of all of the analytics and how you can use them best for your business check out The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics in 2021 from Hubspot. The best part about Google Analytics? It is completely free!
Another useful tracking tool is social media analytics. According to Techopedia social media analytics refers to the approach of collecting data from social media sites and blogs and evaluating that data to make decisions. This process goes beyond the usual monitoring or a basic analysis of retweets or ‘likes’ to develop an in-depth idea of the social consumer. Social media metrics are important because they prove that you can measure how successful a campaign is, how well your social strategy is performing, and ultimately if you will have an impact on your overall business or organization via social media. Social media analytics provides businesses and organizations with insights into customer values, opinions, sentiments and perspectives on brands, marketing campaigns and new service opportunities. Sometimes analytics can seem overwhelming, however, Sprout Social provides advice on which Social Media metrics are the most important to track for you.
The third useful analytics tool is measuring your email analytics. The first step in tracking your email analytics is to identify your goals. Is it to grow your subscriber database? Generate more leads? To convert more existing leads into new customers? Once you identify your goals you can better identify which metrics you should focus on. To begin, Hubspot provides a start by providing a list and explanation of the metrics that every business or organization should be keeping track of. Without analyzing emails, you can’t total up your email marketing efforts, and will have a blurry and inaccurate image of how well things work for you. Email analytics provides a cast amount of data as a basis for improvements: the level of user engagement and loyalty, common behavior patterns, and strong and weak points of your content. With this knowledge you can better target your audience and provide your subscribers with a more personalized experience.
Now where do you start? There are several tools that you can use to get the best analytics and results for you! Google Analytics is a free source that you can use for your website analytics. In addition you can also get certified in google analytics through their free online website course and really become an analytics expert. Most email platforms have analytics reporting within their software such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact. This makes it easy to track how your email campaigns are performing within the software. If you are looking for an all around software that combines google analytics, social media analytics and your email marketing analytics we highly recommend Agency Analytics which is an all-in-one customizable reporting tool for agencies that users can customize and create branded reports for their clients. With all of these tools you can truly become an analytics expert and help better streamline your digital marketing efforts.
