Today I’m brewing up a nice, natural coffee blend (one of my favorites!) and going over the importance of knowing how to collect and analyze digital marketing data.
If you don’t already utilize Google Analytics then START NOW. It’s free and a fantastic tool to gather information about your digital performance.
Google Analytics provides information about your web traffic and website. It collects data like the total traffic your website had, which pages were visited, bounce rate (or how often people go to a page and leave versus staying on a particular page or moving on to other pages). All these factors help you to understand how engaging your website is and its overall successfulness.
Google Analytics will also give you demographic, device, and browser information. It’s super easy to use and can be installed by placing a tag into the head of your website.
There is also a data collection system called Google Tag Manager. This system allows you to quickly and easily update measurement codes (tags) and collect custom data.
Setting up tags will show you how far down on the webpage your audience member scrolled and what buttons they clicked on which pages.
Then we can run behavioral analytics which shows what individual users and groups of users are doing on your website. This provides a page by page breakdown of how people are interacting with your site and what they tend to like and dislike about each page.
To delve even deeper into analyzing website data, you can get into heat mapping. Heat mapping uses several strategies to show user interaction with your website through particular areas of each page. You can even see how a person’s mouse moved across your page, which also gives key indicators about user engagement. Hotjar is an example of a good heat mapping system to utilize.
And then there’s the obvious data collection strategy which would be including polls and surveys on your website that ask users about the success of the page.
Hopefully utilizing these tools will help you understand what your website is doing successfully and what it could be doing better. Happy analyzing!