I’ve signed up for the A – Z Blog Challenge during the month of April. We start with A, of course. A is for Analytics. Without it, your digital marketing will be a guessing game.

What Makes Analytics So Important?

You create a strategy with tons of planning then release your content into the wild to test your initial assumptions. Sooner or later, you need to see whether or not your assumptions hold true in the real world. Did you find the right target market? Are you using the social media platform to the best of your abilities? Are people visiting your website? You need to understand that you can’t just build and implement a strategy without constantly refining it. This is where analytics help you in your quest for a successful marketing funnel. This is a marketing funnel that brings people to your books while you’re sleeping. Yep, you heard right. You can have a fully automated marketing funnel, but it does require building and refining with the use of analytics. 

Google And Facebook’s Free Tools For Analytics

In a typical, “I scratch your back, you scratch mine,” way, these two big guys have free tools to track the performance of your digital marketing. Let’s just take a brief look at both:

Google Analytics – This powerful tool can be used to track how people interact with your website. It can tell you facts like where in the world your website visitors are from, what pages they visited and which of your pages they clicked on next, even what type of device they were using. No, really. It can get deeply accurate, almost scarily so. Don’t worry, though, they don’t pinpoint exact addresses and names, but the information you can get is already incredibly good. With this information, you can improve your website even more.

Facebook Insights – For your Facebook page, you have Facebook Insights to help you along your path to marketing success. It can tell you how many people your posts are reaching, which posts are performing the best, when your users are online during the week, and so much more.

Some Real-World Examples, Please!

Here’s an example of what I’ve learned today looking at the data on Google Analytics. I noticed in the “Behaviour Flow” that people drop off when they reach my Free Short Stories page. This leaves me with the question as to why, so that I can address that and give my website visitor what they’re looking for. If they drop away that quickly from that one page, then I would imagine I am, in fact, not giving them what they’re looking for. Stands to reason, am I right? This will help me to troubleshoot the page, and see how I can add value to my website visitors who come here looking for free stories to read. Because, and I will stress this whenever I can: Your digital marketing is about solving someone else’s problem, thereby adding value to their lives.  

That concludes my brief look at analytics. I can definitely delve more into this in the near future since understanding Analytics and analyzing marketing data is pretty much an entire career in itself.

New to Irrational Pie? Good to have you! 

We all need a little help now and then. And since social media is a pain to maintain, (see what I did there with the rhyming?) Kim at Soul-Comm and myself create social media content that you can schedule for a month. Our packages are affordable so get in touch with Kim today.

Digital marketing can also be a pain to get started with. I recommend going lean. Check out my article on how you can create your own lean, mean digital marketing machine.