Digital Marketing Analytics: A Beginner’s Guide

Have you ever heard “You’re only as good as your last performance”? As a digital marketer, this statement rings true. It’s one thing to create a marketing plan and execute your digital marketing strategies, but reviewing how your marketing campaigns actually performed is a crucial step in determining your return on investment. Enter digital marketing analytics.

Why Digital Marketing Analytics Are Important

98% of consumers expect to make a purchase on social media in 2022. Even if you don’t sell goods and services online, there’s an excellent chance that a potential customer will interact with or research your business online before taking the next step on their customer journey.

One of the benefits of digital marketing data is that it tells you what’s working —and what’s not. When you know this, you can attract customers to your business and prioritize efforts that will reach your ideal clients. It also helps you determine your return on investment (ROI). This is arguably the most important number to pay attention to from a bottom-line perspective. 

Understanding digital marketing analytics helps you make decisions based on numbers, not emotions, and maximize your budget.

How to Analyze Your Digital Marketing Data

One of the perks of taking your marketing digital is that everything is trackable! When you collect and analyze your marketing data, the goal is to understand what your baseline is.

There are several digital marketing analytics tools that you can use to monitor your data. Here are a few of our recommendations:

Google Analytics

You can access almost any data point you can think of when it comes to your website right here. If you want to know how many visitors are coming from social media, organic search, or referral partners, use Google Analytics. To gain a better understanding of the demographics of your visitors on your website, use Google Analytics. If you’re running an SEO-specific content strategy on your website, this is where you want to be looking.

With 91% of the worldwide search engine market share, it makes sense to use Google’s web data analytics to assess your website and marketing. It’s free for anyone with a Google account!

Social media content schedulers

If you use a social media content scheduler like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social, there are a slew of digital marketing analytics tools they provide.

Insights available on the native social media platforms

Individual social media platforms will also provide marketing analytics to review, though there may be limitations on deep-diving into the data. 

For example, Instagram has preset timeframes to analyze statistics rather than allowing you to select a specific range of dates, making it difficult to analyze month-over-month or year-over-year data.

Email marketing

All email marketing platforms provide data on the performance of your email campaigns. Review them frequently to make sure you’re doing more than just sending emails. You want to ensure that your subscribers are reading and taking action! 

Types of Digital Marketing Data to Review

The data from your digital marketing analytics will vary depending on the marketing channel. Here’s a breakdown of some common types:

Web analytics

When conducting your web analytics, these metrics indicate who your audience is and how engaged they are:

• Traffic to website: Pay attention to traffic you get to your website on a monthly basis, including unique visitors and overall traffic (which will account for multiple visits).
• Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who leave the website after viewing one page. The goal is for this percentage to be as low as possible.

• Average session duration and average pages per session: Similar to the bounce rate, this data shows if visitors to your page are engaging with the content on your site. 
• Visitor demographics: From location to gender, age to language, learning more about your website visitors is always a plus. 
• Acquisition: Are your visitors coming from social media, organic search, or a referring website? Understanding your visitors helps you better market to them.
• Device: Device targeting and digital advertising go hand in hand. This is another great data point to know about your website visitors.

Social media analytics

Track these metrics to gauge how your social media channels are performing:

• New followers: If you’re seeing a slowdown in new followers, it may indicate that your strategy is not aligned with the platform’s algorithm, and you may need to switch up your content, whether it’s frequency of posting, types of posting, hashtags, etc.
• Engagement: Engagement refers to the likes, comments, shares, and clicks you get on your social media posts. High engagement means your followers are actively involved with your content, which can also help increase your visibility and reach new followers.
• Reach and impressions: Reach is the total number of unique users who see your content, while impressions are how many times your post was displayed. For example, you may have a reach of 100 people, and if the post appeared twice on everyone’s feed, your impressions would be 200.
• Video metrics: If you’re investing your time in a video marketing strategy, you’ll want to make sure you take a peek at your video views and watch times. 
• Leads acquired and cost per lead: The number of leads you’ve acquired from your digital marketing and advertising efforts is important to track. Cost per lead is useful to watch because it helps you determine your total advertising budget.
• Conversion: If you’re sending people to your website to take a specific action, you’ll want to make sure you’re tracking conversions.

In addition to reviewing each social channel from a high-level perspective, get into the details! Review these stats for individual posts. Your digital marketing analytics will give you great information on the type of content that’s performing best. 

Digital advertising analytics

If your marketing budget includes digital advertising, analyze this data to ensure that you optimize your ROI. In addition to engagement, impressions, and reach, you’ll also want to review:

• Click-through rate (CTR): Whether your call to action is a “Learn More” button that links to your website or a “Call Now” button, this shows the percentage of those who saw your ad and clicked it. A high CTR indicates that users find your content interesting and relevant.
• Conversion rates: Conversion rates are the percentage of users who completed the desired goal of your ad, such as booking a call or making a purchase. 

Email marketing analytics

Whatever email marketing platform you use should provide reporting on your marketing campaigns. Look for:

• Open rate: This shows you how many people opened your email out of everyone who received it. If you have a low open rate, it may mean that your subject lines are not catching readers, or that your messages are going to a Spam/Junk folder.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Of those who opened your email, the CTR shows the percentage of users who took the next step in clicking through to your website or other call to action.
• Bounce rate: Email bounces refer to the percentage of emails that were undeliverable. If this number is high, it means the quality of your email list may need improvement, and you may want to consider removing outdated contacts. There is a difference between “hard” bounces, meaning the email address doesn’t exist, and “soft” bounces, which may occur if the recipient’s mailbox is full.
• Unsubscribe rate: This will indicate whether your email marketing content is bringing value to your readers. 

Understanding your digital marketing analytics will give you a clear picture of what digital marketing efforts are working and not. It also helps you determine the ROI on your investment. When you leverage this marketing data effectively, you can hone in and customize your marketing, attract more customers, gain more leads, and improve your bottom line.