Data for marketing – how much do you know?

How much do you know about your customers? The likelihood is that you have access to huge libraries of data about your customers and how they behave. These days, most of us have more data than we know what to do with. When did you last use this data and how did you use it to improve your digital marketing? You can regularly use this data to boost the quality of your marketing and to help you spot any opportunities that you may be missing. Used correctly, it can also help you to develop highly effective nurture campaigns that drive more people down through your funnels towards an eventual purchase or conversion. Happy days!

Step 1 – Understanding Analytics

One of the first resources you should get to grips with when you’re using data for marketing campaigns is Google Analytics. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ll know that this is a point that we come to time and again. Your Google Analytics account is such a useful source of information that you’d be a fool not to use it – or at least, to find someone who knows how to do it for you.
There’s a huge wealth of areas that you need to consider – we’re going to highlight just a few of them here.

Mobile traffic

How many of your visitors are visiting your website on a mobile phone? It’s important to examine both the current level of mobile traffic and look at how that has changed over the previous 12 months.  It’s quite likely that you’ll find that a significant proportion of your traffic is mobile. If that is the case then you’ll want to make sure that the mobile experience on your website is as good as it possibly can be. Is it just as easy to drop into your marketing funnels on a mobile device or a tablet as it is on a laptop? If you’re using pop-ups to capture data, do they work just as well on a mobile as a desktop? Have you considered whether user behaviour on a mobile should  be factored in to when you actually show your pop ups for data capture?
You can also drill further in to the data. Are visitors on a mobile spending less time on the website? Is there a specific page that is causing them to leave the website? Interrogating this information will enable you to build a better website that converts more of your visitors into prospects and customers.

Bounces – critical stuff

We briefly touched on bounces in our section on mobile traffic but understanding which pages cause people to leave your website is critical.  You should be refining your website to reduce bounce rate. There are two key metrics to consider here. Firstly, the overall bounce rate of your website – you should always be aiming to reduce it. Secondly, you need to know if there are any particular pages that cause people to click away from your website. If there are, change them. The best way to know what’s working is to run regular A/B Tests on your website and roll out the most effective pages in terms of conversion.

On page Analytics

What do people actually do when they’re on a page on your website. The most effective way to track this when you’re using data for marketing campaigns is to make use of a specialised piece of software like Mouseflow . There’s already some basic information  in the on-page analytics section of Google Analytics, showing which links your visitors are most likely to click on a page. This helps you build a picture of how your visitors journey through your site. Again, this is information that you should be taking into account to improve the user-flow on your site and to boost the number of funnel drop-ins and conversions.
 
In the second part of this article, we’ll be examining how you can use data to improve the quality of your email marketing, pay per click campaigns and even your offline marketing. In the meantime, if you’d like us to take a professional view on your online marketing data, please contact one of our digital marketing experts. We’d be delighted to hear from you.