Why Analyse your Digital Marketing Activity
Like most things in business, your digital marketing activity requires monitoring and analysing on a regular basis. Otherwise, how do you know what is and isn’t working. There’s a very famous marketing quote by John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whilst that may have been true when it was written, technology has allowed us the opportunity to measure almost everything.
The most important thing is to understand what really matter, what are the KPIs that we should be looking at for your business? We often get asked to prepare reems of reports that never get read and give lots of data when what you most often need to know is:
How much traffic am I getting to my website
Is it the right traffic
What do people do when they get there
How many take action e.g. fill in a form, buy a product, pick up the phone
These are the key elements that any business should be spending their time understanding. The reason to analyse them? So that you can improve on a continuous basis, hold your current market position or identify areas that just aren’t working for you.
How does Digital Marketing Analysis Work?
Like anything in business, it’s important to analyse and adjust consistently. What works this month may not work 6 months later, especially where digital marketing is concerned as there are so many ever changing variables to consider.
For all of our clients we hold team reviews on a regular basis to really identify the things that are working and why. We also look at the things that aren’t working as well so that we can come up with an improvement plan.
- Identify the most import things to measure
- Monitor current performance
- Identify strong / weak areas
- Deep dive into those areas
- Understand why things are or aren’t working
- Adjust activity accordingly
Performance Indicators
From our point of view there are a number of key areas that we analyse.
- Traffic – are there any fluctuations in traffic numbers and if so why? Where is that traffic coming from and how are people finding your website in the first place.
- Ranking – whilst the days of compiling a list of 10 keywords to ‘go after’ is long gone, there is some benefit in tracking some longer tailed keyphrases to give an overall feel of where things are.
- Backlinks – we don’t do lots of spammy link building, but we do try and gain relevant and higher quality links for our clients and so of course this is something that we track.
- Technical – we look at technical elements on the website, are there plugin updates that need to be done, has site speed fallen, what can we do to make the website even better?
- On-Page – we review meta data, internal linking, conversion, call to actions and a whole host of other on-page elements.
- Ads – if we are running paid ad’s for our clients then we of course analyse the performance and adjust and tweak consistently.
- Market – looking at the competition and the industry market online.
- Business – changes within the business itself so that we can adapt what we are doing accordingly
Reporting
We don’t spend a lot of our time putting together long reports. We have found over the years that most of our clients won’t read them anyhow, it’s just too much detail. What they really want to see is how they are performing in terms of traffic, how people are coming to their website and how that impacts leads.
The main measure for most of our clients is how many people are taking action, how many are calling, buying a product online, filling out a form or sending an email. We always suggest businesses have their own way of measuring where leads have come from, that way we can discuss and identify any changes as non everything can be tracked online.
Of course, if it’s something that a client specifically requests, then we can provide more detailed reports for them.
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