13/10/2021 - All About Analytics: What are Analytics? | Website Blog | Purple Creative Studio
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All About Analytics: What are Analytics?

Now the world is obsessed with all things digital, analytics has become a key part of marketing efforts. The world of analytics, however, is very broad and encompasses a wide range of platforms and tools which can make it a nightmare for businesses to get their head around! 

With this in mind, here’s the first instalment of our All About Analytics blog series! Here, we’ve shared some useful information to help explain what analytics are and why they are so important to your digital marketing strategy. 

🤔 What are Analytics?


In simple terms, analytics find patterns in marketing data to give you actionable knowledge that you can then use to improve your marketing strategy. One of the many beauties of digital marketing is that your efforts can be tracked! Where a leaflet drop or magazine advert may be a good marketing strategy, in theory, there is no way of tracking the exact number of people who read the material or took an action. But, with online efforts you can! Analytics tools gather and present statistics, data and insights to answer questions that can relate to marketing trends, user behaviour, buyer personas and optimising user experience. 


Most social media channels have their own in-built analytics you can use. Facebook has its own inbuilt ‘insights’ for Business Pages which collect and show a range of data such as post engagement, increase in likes and an overview of your followers’ demographics. You can find similar inbuilt insights on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and beyond!


In terms of online marketing and website analytics, your site’s content management system may have a built-in analytics tool with base-level data included, such as page views or site visits, which can be handy to know! Further tools like Google Analytics (which we’ll go into more detail later in our series) and text files known as cookies can help to gather deeper information about your website visitors, such as if they’re new or returning and how they found your site. You can learn all about your customer demographics and buying habits through these too. 


Analytics go beyond social media and your website, as they’re also available for online ads and email marketing! When looking at your email campaign performance, key data can include open rates which is the percentage of recipients that opened your email and click through rates which tell you how many readers then clicked on a link within your email. Platforms such as Mailchimp can also show you how your campaign compares to industry standards too. 


A key takeaway from analytics is not to worry too much about your initial findings, it matters more what you do with the data to help drive your marketing efforts and improve!


❓ Why are Analytics important?


The data gathered helps you turn analytics into an easy to follow action plan that helps you make the most of your time and money spent on marketing and is a key measure of success! 


In simple terms, analytics help you find out what is working and what isn’t. This is done by enabling you to compare your marketing data including organic searches, paid searches and social media. It’s also great to segment your audience and tailor ads to different demographics.


Alongside segmenting your audience based on demographics you can segment based on behaviours such as those who abandon carts, browse without buying and people who haven’t been back to your website in a while.


If you are using Ad’s it can be a great way to ensure you serve the right ad, at the right time and on the right channel to engage with potential customers. Analytics can also give your SEO efforts a boost through insights into site traffic and search queries. 

You can even improve the site performance through data into load times alongside which pages your customers leave quickly or pay no attention to. Analytics are great as they help you report on the past, analyse the present and influence future marketing!


Remember you must ensure you are GDPR compliant when gathering consumer data.

 

👍 Main Take-Aways from Analytics 


Phew - that was a lot wasn’t it? Analytics is a very daunting part of online marketing, but it is something that every business should be utilizing big or small to get the best results from their time and money. Hopefully, this blog series will help you navigate systems such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, and you’ll feel a little less apprehensive about using them. Get stuck into analytics - we promise you have nothing to lose and everything to gain! Keep an eye out for upcoming posts in our series, next up we’ll be sharing some easy to use tools to get you started...

 

Interested in using digital marketing and analytics to grow your business? If you’d like to see how we can help you connect with your customers please get in touch! 

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