Analytics tools are key for any business with an online presence to determine success, areas to grow, and exactly how customers are interacting with your brand online. With a plethora of marketing analytics tools already available, investing in analytics can be straightforward – but making sure you’re collecting the right data, analysing user behaviour and implementing changes can take some time, making the process daunting for many business owners. So, how do analytics tools help to drive business growth?
Analytics can give you a competitive edge
With fully implemented analytics tools, and all the user data at your disposal, you can look at alternative ways to gain a significant organic advantage over your competitors – without having to invest in paid media.
For many businesses, this could be the ability to identify key points in the customer lifecycle and how they are reaching your business online, or pain points in their interactions with your website and ecommerce solutions that are holding up success. Your analytics tools can pick up each interaction with customers, help you to identify distinct audiences, and understand your customers needs – helping you to identify marketing funnels and make strategic changes that prompt your users to perform the actions you need for business success.
Data gathering and identifying opportunities
The vast majority of marketing teams deal with both offline and online multichannel, multi-touchpoint campaigns, so gathering insights to understand how to most effectively engage with customers is crucial. Analytics tools can help you gather these metrics at every point of a user’s interaction with your website, and is especially important for correctly recording events and onsite conversions such as sales or contact points.
Choosing which metrics to focus on, and what constitutes success for your business online are key elements for identifying trends and opportunities with your users. How you differentiate between vanity and actionable metrics can have a big impact on the success of your campaigns that utilise this data.
Vanity Metrics are those which you can measure, but which don’t really matter. They can be easily changed or manipulated, and they often do not bear any relevance or direct correlation with numbers that actually indicate business success. Examples include impressions, likes, followers and in some examples the aforementioned traffic.
However, it’s important to truly consider whether or not a statistic like social follower numbers or impressions are always a vanity metric. If they facilitate actionable decision making, they are still able to make a valuable contribution to your sales funnel and help steer your strategy.
As long as those impressions are leading to clicks, clicks to actions, actions to sales (in ever-improving ratios), nurturing users down the funnel, then they still contribute to the goal; they should just not be used as a measuring stick of success
Analytics helps you better understand customers
With marketing analytics, you’re no longer limited to guesswork and ‘finger in the air’ tactics when it comes to knowing what will resonate with customers. Because with features such as speech analytics, you have the means to directly access and analyse the thoughts, feelings and concerns of real-world customers. In fact, speech analytics helps you better understand customer behaviour, needs and preferences. And ultimately, you’ll build more profitable marketing campaigns informed by the insights you capture from real life customer conversations.
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