10 Benefits of Analytics Tracking
Analytics tracking provides a solid data-backing for any marketing decisions made across a site and company.
There are many good reasons to prioritise analytics in marketing, from understanding user behaviour to optimising content effectiveness. Using these metrics, businesses can better understand how audiences interact with their content and make adjustments accordingly to tighten ROI and remove weaknesses from the user journey.
These ten benefits of tracking analytics are some of the most important to keep in mind when analysing strategies and identifying areas of concern.
1. Understand Your Audience
Analytics tools provide insights into who is actually using a site or consuming its content. This can help to validate audience personas, and provide an understanding of those demographics’ needs, preferences and behaviours. This is particularly effective for those in the B2B and lead-gen space, for example.
With solid data-driven audience personas, a company can make better-informed decisions on effective targeting and engagement strategies for each marketing channel or campaign.
2. Understand Traffic Sources
Getting fixated on top level traffic, such as the number of site visitors, or the number of people viewing a certain ad is a common web analytics mistake. However, effective analytics isn’t just about which channels are driving traffic, but also the quality of the traffic.
Depending on the company and end goal, the channels analysed will differ. But by examining other important metrics in the user journey, businesses can identify which channels are driving the most valuable traffic and supporting the end conversion.
These cross-channel comparisons then allow for more effective planning and resource allocation, leading to a lot more conversions or sales without upping overall marketing spend.
This is exactly what Common Ground did to help Reporting Ninja, refining its approach to both top-of-the-funnel content and bottom-of-the-funnel, to drive a growth in visibility and SQL’s (sales qualified leads).
3. Measuring User Engagement
User engagement levels are indicative of how effective messaging, targeting and UX are across a site or campaign, before even reaching the conversion stage. It can help identify weaknesses in a site’s journey, or messaging that isn’t resonating.
These metrics, like page views, time on site, time on page, scroll depth, bounce rate, engagement times, etc. all provide an understanding of how effective specific marketing channels are at delivering to the right audience. From there, messaging can be really refined and specific personas can be targeted based on user engagement across different channels.
If, for instance, tracking shows a high bounce rate on a specific message or page, it means that the audience simply isn’t engaging with the content and it needs re-evaluating.
4. Conversion Tracking
This is especially important for sites that aren’t e-commerce, as conversion tracking needs to be monitored in a different way to understand if the site fulfils its intended goals. One of the key ways to understand this is to track micro and macro conversions, rather than sticking to just macro, as a lot of businesses do.
What are micro and macro conversions?
Micro conversions usually measure lead-gen type activities, such as downloading or signing up to something on a website.
Macro conversions provide insight into the overall effectiveness of marketing when someone gets in touch, or purchases.
Understanding their differences and monitoring both will help identify weaknesses in a funnel, UX or messaging.
5. ROI Analysis
Are you able to evaluate your ROAS and ROI? They may sound similar but both need tracking to better evaluate the full effectiveness of marketing strategies and value for money of campaigns.
What are ROI and ROAS?
ROI (Return on Investment) includes all costs paid toward the effort of the campaign. This means any agencies paid, ad creation, manhours, etc. are all calculated into ROI.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is instead about basing success and returns on a specific marketing campaign spend, like an ad, not overall expenditure.
Understanding both of these helps guide future budget allocation and decision-making.
6. Identifying Patterns and Trends
Using specific metrics, it’s easier to track and understand patterns and trends within a business. If coupled with a comprehensive knowledge of ROI and/or ROAS, then conversion rates can be increased without having to do the same to the overall budget.
This can be done by allocating it differently based on trends in performance data. Anything from seasonal variations to the rising popularity of certain products or topics can affect conversion rates at different times of the year. A real estate company, for example, may find a downward trend in buyers during December, due to a general unwillingness to move during the Christmas period.
It can also be used to optimise other parts of the business, such as supply chains, by changing product ordering quantities depending on the month or season.
If this data is trackable, it’s far simpler to better and more effectively allocate budget, and tailor products or services to different demands based on the patterns and seasonal trends identified.
7. Optimising marketing campaigns
This is one of the most obvious and common benefits of tracking analytics. But the importance of optimising marketing campaigns as they run can’t be understated.
Tracking marketing metrics and data analysis provides actionable insights in real-time. It’s easy to then make quick adjustments to campaigns, improving their performance and effectiveness.
Relying on data from ad platforms means the information is usually based on a last-click attribution model. This means there’s no information of the user journey before the final point where they convert. In fact, a recent webinar poll by Common Ground found that 70% of marketers can’t track conversions all the way through to the point of sale.
By layering analytics data from third-party sites like Google Analytics, and adding CRM information on top, it’s much easier to get a better big picture of customer trends. From there, it’s easier to identify channels that are instrumental in getting the customer to the point of conversion.
Don’t be afraid to leave the specific platform and look at analytics as a whole for comparisons and success points in the funnel. Omnichannel analysis allows for better optimisation of platforms that may support conversions rather than generate them.
8. Enhancing User Experience
User experience is a key factor in driving customer retention and approval. Analytics tracking provides businesses with valuable insights into user navigation, site issues and potential weaknesses or barriers to conversion.
By analysing these user experience metrics via data instead of user testing, companies can achieve a clear and natural picture of a user journey. This is much more effective than user testing which can be influenced by observer bias.
Using this data, including heat maps, bounce rates, and exit rates, data-driven improvements can then be made to the site’s design, pathways and functionality.
9. Diagnose Site Issues
Analytics is the key to unlocking potential issues within organic traffic or SEO strategy. Looking at performance by section or product area allows for bundling and segmenting of analytics for clearer analysis. From here, it’s easier to diagnose whether site issues are at an individual level, a section level, region level, or site level.
Taking that data, work backward using that as a starting point to establish why there is a decrease in traffic, conversion, rankings, impressions, etc.
Using third-party analytics apps in tandem with this strategy can also help pinpoint where site issues take place. Apps like Screaming Frog or the Lighthouse Speed Test can highlight any major technical issues occurring sitewide that can also impact rankings and other metrics.
While these are more overarching tools, once placed alongside a strategy for analysing segmented data, both can be used to narrow down any issues that are affecting metrics measuring.
Using this tactic, Common Ground was able to identify multiple technical issues for Saracen Interiors after a site migration, reducing the lost traffic by 50%.
10. Decision Making
Overall, web analytics provide a data-driven basis for decision-making, reducing the reliance on guesswork and intuition in marketing strategy.
There is still a place for using market and audience knowledge as well as intuition in interpreting the data. However, tracking analytics allows theories and strategies to be backed up with cold hard figures that appeal to company stakeholders and optimise the decision-making process.
It’s essential to make analytics tracking a key part of any business plan. Solid figures and analysis guide ideas, strategies and company goals with data-driven optimisation suggestions. The above advantages of measuring metrics are just the tip of the iceberg. If a company is failing to track data, they’re missing out on key information that serves to refine marketing tactics and pinpoint areas for improvement.
Ultimately, analytics not only validate suggested campaigns and ideas but also provide actionable insights for tangible growth.
For more information on why you should be tracking analytics as a crucial part of your overall marketing strategy and business plan, check out our webinar on how to increase your marketing effectiveness here.
