Welcome back to the TLMA blog where we bring you the latest from our luxury digital agency. Well, much has indeed changed in the last month since we shared our thoughts on digital strategy post-Covid, an interview with hatton garden jewellers Diamond Hatton Garden and we saw the fantastic work that the Kensington and Chelsea Foundation are undertaking. As the world continues to move at an accelerated pace towards digital, we look at the importance of analytics to digital marketing.
For many years businesses were at the mercy of data or a lack thereof. Ad campaigns, phone sales and mailout catalogues were common features and channels for a variety of businesses. Aside from the obvious referral code it was difficult to directly track sales, contact points and more. With the advent of new technologies more and more contact points have been created and, thus, more data has become available. Huge computational capabilities have made the analysis and understanding of customer behavior, marketing effectiveness, and business strategy available to enterprises large and small.
Data collection and analysis have become commonplace not just in a business sense but in a myriad of daily contexts. As data becomes more and more readily available the importance of leveraging the data itself and understanding it becomes increasingly important.
Digital marketing is fortunate that data touch points can be easily created, measured and improved to assist businesses in their ongoing goals, to feedback successes and to use the data to fine tune and optimise a given campaign. So, why is data so important in digital marketing? Read our top 3 points below.
Data Helps You To Understand Your Customers
Data is essential to understand your target audience, their behaviours, demographics, what they will likely do and how you can guide them to a conversion. It helps you to build out preferences, likes, dislikes and interests and build out client and market profiles. In an increasingly personalised online experience, being able to access this data and implement it is vital.
You Can Make Data-Driven Predictions
Through analysing data it is possible to make more insightful and data driven decisions. You can understand which channels stand the highest chance of converting, you can assess what you may need on your route to market and find out demand.
You Can Improve Your Results
As you begin to understand your clients and their habits you can make intelligent decisions to improve your performance and how you market to them in order to improve your campaigns through measuring and refinement. Be it the first contact point through a social media channel, to creating custom emails based on preferences; improving results is one of the main goals of harnessing data.
What are the main systems to measure digital marketing success?
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the industry standard for measuring the performance of a website. Analytics, developed by Google, is a free to use platform that works through the adding of a snippet of code to a website. Through the code it is possible to track how users interact with your website and their behaviour on the site. From the acquisition of users to the pages that they leave from, the time spent on specific content to the abandonment of carts Google Analytics allows access to unp[resednted amounts of data that can assist in improving conversion rate and measure the success of marketing channels.
Dashboard Metrics
Dashboard metrics can refer to a number of different measurement suits but in this context we are using it to refer to either in-built analytics on a website or a dashboard like that of Google Ads. As a leading luxury PPC agency, our PPC team spends a huge amount of time in Ads understanding the performance of the individual campaigns. Overlaid with Google Analytics, great integration by the way, allows for a huge picture that can be developed to understand consumers and performance. Likewise, in-built dashboards such as those on CMS systems provide additional data. However, our general preference is to use Google’s data more so than CMS dashboards because of the amount of Google provides. Of course, with any data source it is the overlaying of data that is important in order to widen the perspective and gain more understanding.
Social Media Management Suites
Much like dashboard metrics, social media management suites such as social listening tools and scheduling tools allow users to track the performance of posts and social campaigns. Of course, like much with digital marketing, social media does not exist in isolation to other analytical channels but as a way to compliment and provide additional data that can be further scrutinised and used to improve performance.
Google Search Console
Rounding of the suite of Google products is Google Search Console. Essentially, whilst Analytics details the performance of a front end of a website and user behaviour, Google Search Console provides a more technical overview of the performance and general website health. From sitemap submissions to individual page performances, rich snippets to CTRs GSC is a robust platform that gives great insight into the technical side of things.
SEO Tracking Programs
Working as a luxury SEO agency we need access to SEO related stats in order to measure our successes and improve the performance. Principally, an SEO tracking program will track the performance of a portfolio of keywords and how they perform over a given period of time. What’s more, they often will provide additional information as to the performance against competitors as well as providing technical SEO suggestions in order to fix on page issues. Backlinks, the main offsite activity, are measured as well as web visibility as an ongoing SEO campaign develops. During the progress of a campaign it is possible to see the increase in visibility and the rise of keywords which is an incredibly satisfying feeling indeed! SEO tracking programs come in many guises but are often very similar in features and personal preference, easy-of-use and presentation are typically considered by agencies when choosing the right platform.
The importance of data in digital marketing cannot be overstated and can look confusing at first. Of course, as mentioned above, it is a question of finding the right tools for the job and using these various data sources to create a bigger picture of performance and successes. TLMA work with each client to develop a clear strategy for each of their marketing goals and use our data sources to create clear, understandable pictures that assist businesses not only refine their marketing performance through data driven decisions based on evidence and performance. For more information about our luxury marketing agency contact our teams via hello@thelucurymarketingagency.com or on 00447835 233607.
