Analytics: What you need to know
Data controls everything we do now. And businesses have an almost overwhelming amount of data to sift through. With all social media platforms, your website, and email constantly giving you streams of analytics, it can get tempting to skim over them or disregard them completely. However, analytics is one of the most important aspects to focus on to increase your ROI (Return on Investment). The immense work you put into sustaining your online portals must also translate into greater revenue, and there are a few simple ways to use your analytics better to reach there!
Identity Useful Metrics From Vanity Ones
Getting boatloads of more followers for your Instagram feels deeply satisfying. It’s a feeling of your work being acknowledged, appreciated, and literal numbers on a screen going up due to your perseverance. However, know that the amount of followers you have on your social media is not one of the best indicators to keep track of the monetary growth of your business. You could get an influx of followers for many reasons; changes in the algorithm, a shoutout, or a reel that went slightly viral. Paying attention to social media followers, Facebook fans, or website views doesn’t add much to your business. Instead of these vanity metrics, consider investing more time in analyzing actual engagement from users. A follower doesn’t mean much unless they meaningfully interact with your brand. This positive engagement includes figuring out how many active users you have (they’re more likely to buy things from you or recommend you to others) and whether the people sharing your posts translate into customers who pay for your products. Engagement metrics allow you to track your customer’s behavior and determine what they’re interested in/interacting with versus what they ignore. Accordingly, you can modify your business strategy for what your active users want. These users are also the best ones to track before, during, and after you launch a new marketing initiative or a redesign! You can then analyze whether their engagement increased, decreased, or stayed neutral, thus getting insight into the success of that marketing strategy.
Sales Are Also Dependent On Customer Behavior
When companies plan their analytics, they often base it on the company’s availability. In other words, they focus more on last year’s budget than an actual strategy for mining relevant data from users. This needs to change for more significant ROI from analytics. Seeing how a customer moves through the website and what affects their sales purchase is one of the most critical aspects of your marketing and business strategies. For example, if you launched a new campaign through a series of gorgeous reels that displayed your lip glosses on a succession of beautiful people, and then launched exactly one product giveaway per reel, many people would engage with the content. However, how many of those people, once they’ve lost the giveaway, are moving from Instagram to your website to buy the product themselves? These are vital questions that data mining can help you with. Tracking what influences a customer’s decision to buy a product, almost buy it, or not add it to their cart at all should influence your business strategy.
Identify Goals
To get the most out of your ROI, you must have clearly defined goals for what you want to focus on and what you choose to ignore. As mentioned, there is just too much data to go into it blind—you need to have a plan or strategy; otherwise, you’ll be overwhelmed by the sheer volume. While we’ve discussed the possibility of analytics modifying your business strategy, sometimes, it can be the opposite. This is especially true if there’s a company acquisition, a shift of focus, a redesign, or a relaunch. During times like these, you need to know what indicators you’re interested in to get the most accurate data on them accordingly. For example, your investors might care a lot about the number of “add-to-cart” clicks on your website, while others might be more interested in users that moved from Twitter to your website. Either way, data mining helps you answer these essential questions for your business.
Experiment & Play!
There is no singular perfect plan when it comes to business strategies. They have to change and evolve over time as user behavior changes, as you grow, and as the overall climate modifies. For example, a marketing strategy you employed in March that worked exceptionally well will work differently in December. You need to experiment and play with your strategy, and the way to keep track of what is working and what isn’t serving you is analytics. Constantly monitor your analytics to develop new strategies, figure out what is working, and find ways to boost ROI based on user engagement.
There is no magic wand that one can wave over data to transform it into revenue. It’s simply a process of mining and harvesting the relevant material to make the most of the effort you are already putting into your business. Analytics is merely another tool that you can employ to understand your customer base better, and you should make the most of it to increase your ROI and strengthen your marketing strategies!
Always in your corner,
The Content Queens
