Benefits Of Digital Marketing Analytics (With Key Metrics)

Updated 27 September 2022

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Marketing analytics helps professionals gain critical insights from marketing data. Digital marketers analyse key performance indicators (KPIs) to optimise their marketing campaigns in real-time, improving conversions and revenues. If you are interested in a career in digital marketing, understanding marketing analytics can help you make data-driven decisions to improve the success of your campaigns. In this article, we discuss what digital marketing analytics is, explore its benefits, outline some important metrics for measuring the outcomes of a digital marketing campaign and share tips for building an analytics strategy:

What Is Digital Marketing Analytics?

Digital marketing analytics is the process of transforming customer behaviour and user data into actionable business insights. Digital marketers collect critical customer data and use analytics tools to examine the collected data to identify patterns and reveal critical insights that help them optimise future marketing campaigns. It helps digital marketers evaluate their success and calculate the return on investment (ROI) of their marketing initiatives. Marketers also identify customer trends and patterns to make data-driven marketing and business decisions. In simple terms, it helps eliminate guesswork from digital marketing campaigns.

Benefits Of Digital Marketing Analytics

Here are a few reasons why analytics help you improve the efficiency and ROI of your digital marketing campaigns:

Helps understand customer preferences

Marketers can use analytics to identify customer data and demographics to gain helpful insights into your target audience. Demographic data helps you know more about your target audience, including their gender, ages, geographical locations and interests. You can use this information to optimise your marketing campaigns to match your target audience. For example, you can use customer data to build ideal customer personas or profiles, which help you identify your target audience, their preferences and how to convert them into customers.

Optimises marketing campaigns to match customer behaviour

When you have a clearer understanding of your target customers, you can customise the marketing strategies to suit their preferences. By analysing the data behind your digital marketing campaigns, you can identify why and how your audience interacted with your marketing content. This helps you optimise the efficiency of your marketing campaigns by identifying suitable messaging channels and frequency. For example, if digital analytics reveals that your target audience spends more time reading your email newsletters than social media posts, you can invest more in email marketing to increase conversions and sales.

Enhances personalisation

One of the best ways to improve the returns of your digital marketing campaigns is to personalise the marketing message to match customer preferences. Digital analytics helps you gain critical insights into how customers interact on different channels and how they are likely to respond to your campaigns. Using this information, you can personalise your digital content, delivery channel and timing to suit the specific preferences of your target audience, improving their chances of conversion.

Improves customer experience

Digital analytics helps marketers track user actions on client websites. This helps them understand critical user experience details like why users abandon their cart or where they exited from the site. They can then use these insights to remove user experience obstacles and streamline website navigation to improve user experience and increase conversions.

Helps predict customer behaviour

Marketing analytics provide insights into past customer experiences and help marketers identify patterns that predict future behaviours. For example, marketers can use A/B testing to compare two versions of a website or app against each other to determine which performs better for a specific goal. Additionally, analytics helps marketers track trends and stay ahead of their competition. For example, if analytics reveals that a particular holiday-specific recipe post produced high engagement, digital marketers can capitalise on this trend to attract even higher engagements for upcoming holidays.

Helps make data-driven predictions

Data analysis helps you identify current trends and conduct predictive analysis to make marketing decisions that are data-driven and insightful. Predictive data analysis helps businesses determine which products to market and when. It helps you predict industry trends to alter your marketing campaigns to suit ongoing trends.

Important Metrics To Analyse For Digital Marketing Campaigns

Digital marketers identify key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics for marketing analytics. Choosing the wrong metrics might not deliver the expected results. For example, the insights from organic traffic are better suited to evaluate the success of an SEO campaign. In contrast, likes and comments are more appropriate for gauging the engagement levels of social media campaigns. Here are a few key metrics to analyse for different digital marketing campaigns:

Analytics metrics for websites

Analysing the right digital metrics for websites can help marketers make informed decisions about user experience, website design and webpage copywriting. Here are a few vital digital metrics for websites:

Site load speed: This indicates the average time it takes for a webpage to load for a visitor. The shorter the load speed, the better the user experience
The number of visitors: Known as page view, this metric tracks the number of users visiting a site
Session: This denotes how active the user is on a page. A user actively scrolling, reading and navigating to different parts of the site is a session
Traffic: This indicates the total number of page visits and it helps marketers track the source of site traffic to identify from where the user is visiting the site. Types of site traffic include organic, direct, paid, referral and social traffic
Time spent on page: This refers to the time a user spends on a site per session
Interactions per visit: The number and type of actions a user takes on your site in a session
Bounce rate: The percentage of site visitors who left the site without completing the desired action, such as checking out

Analytics metrics for email marketing

Digital marketers can use the following metrics to measure the efficiency of their email marketing campaigns:

Open rate: It indicates the percentage of users who open your email newsletter compared to the total number of emails sent out
Bounce rate: It indicates the number of emails that failed to be delivered compared to the total number of emails sent as part of a marketing campaign
Click-through rate (CTR): CTR refers to the number of users who completed the call-to-action you have specified in the email compared to the number of users who merely opened it
Unsubscribe rate: The number of users who unsubscribed compared to the total number of users on the list

Analytics metrics for content marketing

Content marketing focuses on providing the target audience with relevant, high-quality content. Digital marketers can use the following metrics to analyse the efficiency of their content marketing campaigns:

Engagement rate: This measures the total number of engagements of a piece of content such as likes, shares, saves and comments compared to the total number of views of the content
Time spent on page: It measures the amount of time a user spends on a piece of content. The longer the user stays on the page, the more interest they have in the content
Bounce rate: The percentage of users who exit the content page without taking action
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of users who completed a call-to-action, like submitting their information on a lead generation form, compared to the total number of visitors to the page

Analytics metrics for social media marketing

Social media marketing primarily focuses on user engagement; hence the metrics are concerned with users taking specific actions. Here are a few essential metrics to analyse to determine the results of your social media marketing campaigns:

Shares, likes or follows: It measures the number of shares, likes or follows of a specific social media post or account
Engagement rate: It measures the total number of engagements on a social media post, including likes, comments, shares and saves

Tips For Developing A Digital Marketing Analysis Strategy

Here are a few tips for building an efficient analytics strategy for your digital marketing campaigns:

Define the problem. Identify the problem you wish to solve and choose the proper KPIs. For example, if an underperforming website is a crucial problem, you might select site traffic as the metric you want to analyse
Set data-driven goals. Once you have identified the problem, a measurable goal helps you stay focused. For example, you might set a goal to increase your monthly site traffic to 10,000 visits within six months
Collect accurate data. You can use data analysis tools to collect accurate data. For example, you can use plugins to identify how a user arrived on your page, what they clicked on the site and why they exited the page without completing the CTA.
Make informed changes. Use the collected data and insights to make the right changes to achieve your goal. You can use A/B or user testing to gauge the impact of each change before implementing it on a large scale
Experiment and optimise. Once you have achieved the initial goal, you can repeat the process for other goals. Digital analytics is constantly changing and experimenting with different strategies and analyses helps you improve the efficiency of your campaigns