A digital analytics tool can provide enterprises with several custom or standard reports and dashboards today. But the real relevance of that data lies in teams being able to find the right answers at the right time. Because of the sheer amount of data that is being produced by companies, it has become difficult for business users to locate the relevant metrics that contain the insights they need for decision-making. This problem is further compounded by the fact that data is spread out over multiple tools. The outcome of this situation is usually an inadequate solution to a business problem, or worse still, a wrong one that eventually leads to undesired business outcomes and a colossal waste of time and resources.
In this blog post, we have compiled some of the important practices that every organization should execute in their digital analytics journey:
Goal-setting
It is important to establish expectations from analytics right at the outset. Prioritizing the requirements can help organizations maneuver through tricky situations and ensure that analysts are able to efficiently respond to business needs. This can be achieved through a KPI Workshop. It helps in identifying the business questions that need to be answered; builds a consensus across the organization about the metrics that must be tracked; creates a standardized KPI definition, responses, and benchmarks, and above all aligns analytics with the business requirements.
Selecting the right tools
There are hundreds of digital analytics solutions available in the market today, but before investing in a solution you must ponder over carefully if the tool can scale with your business and provide a comprehensive and all-encompassing analysis? The first step is to gather all the business requirements, conduct a site architectural audit, assess all the IT operations, evaluate the content strategy, and then shortlist the tools that meet all the above requirements. Selecting the right tool is a rigorous process and it is better to take help of experts in the domain if your requirement is complex. By implementing the tool that meets your business requirements, you can ensure more accurate analytics, greater adoption among users, and optimized analytics process.
Tool implementation
Successful implementation of your analytics tool will ensure accurate and timely insights. And on the other hand, incorrect implementation can result in just the opposite. You can either implement the tool directly, but if you would like to go for a solution vendor then, analyze the following:
- Does the solution vendor offer implementation and integration services?
- Can the analytics solution vendor assist you with the following tasks:
- Creating a web analytics implementation strategy
- Writing the technical and business specifications
- Validating business reports
- Tag managementTool configuration and 3rd party data integrations
- Build a digital analytics roadmap
A comprehensive and well-designed implementation solution should assist you with every aspect of strategy execution including tag management, data audit or configuration of web analytics platform, customization, etc.
Testing and optimization
After implementation comes testing and optimization for improving user experience and increase conversions. Some of the key areas of testing include:
- Conversion rate optimization: CRO is becoming one of the fastest growing practices in digital space today because of its ability to help grow sales and leads from a website, increase engagement, enhance the efficiency of marketing efforts, and raise overall website effectiveness.
- A/B testing: It is a method that is used to compare two web page versions or apps against each other to ascertain which one performs better. It is a simple methodology that will help kick-start your optimization journey.
- Multivariate tests: These tests allow you to test multiple options of the same page and can give you accurate results without increasing the sample size. The benefit here is that the impact of every change that you have made to optimize your page can be analyzed easily.
- Landing page optimization: Optimizing your landing pages in order to make your visitors take the desired steps is called landing page optimization. Adopting LPO can lead to more conversions, increased overall sales traction, improved website rankings, and raised ROI of marketing or advertising campaigns.
- Mobile app testing: As the mobile usage is surging across the globe, mobile app testing is helping marketers to understand what’s working and what isn’t in terms of app experience and marketing efforts as quickly as possible.
Data visualization
By integrating data into comprehensible dashboards, users are able to identify business trends, business opportunities, and focus areas. Whether they are KPIs that haven’t been met or hidden prospects that have not been explored, data visualization is a powerful mechanism helping leaders make improved business decisions. Complex business problems can be understood and addressed more quickly because of the visualization tools and their ability to tell a compelling story out of raw data. Data visualization benefits your business by:
- Converting data into easy-to-understand, result-driven insights
- Informing and engaging the users through visuals
- Simplifying, integrating and correlating enormous amounts of data
- Providing relevant business answers to the right users at the right time
If all of the above are taken care of then you are all set on the road to success in your digital analytics journey.