Why are Analytics Important?
This article explores exactly why analytics are so important, what you can do with proper analytics, and highlights some situations where implementing analytics makes a big difference.
What are analytics?
You’ve probably heard the term thrown around a lot, but it’s always good to start at the beginning and define exactly what it means.
As defined by Wikipedia: “Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.”
In the context of Internet marketing, this means things like user demographics, how users interact with your website, mapping out conversion paths, and so on.
There are several types of analytics, including descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. Using different types of data analytics, you can measure the success of your strategies and make informed decisions to improve them to drive better results for your business in the future.
When we talk about measuring analytics, this almost always refers to the use of Google Analytics, which is Google’s free analytics platform. If you’ve never heard of Google Analytics, check out our article on implementing Google Analytics to get started measuring your own data.
Marketers sometimes distinguish between “web analytics” and “marketing analytics” as well. Web analytics refers to website-specific metrics like page load times, time spent on a certain page, page views per visit, and so on. Marketing analytics refers to things like overall traffic, leads acquired, leads converted, your sales funnel, and so on.
Both web and marketing analytics are necessary to make fully informed decisions regarding your web presence and performance.
Why are they important?
Internet marketing without analytics is like pointing at NYC and saying “the building is somewhere in there.” Internet marketing with analytics is akin to pinpointing the exact location of a specific building using satellite technology.
You can’t really make informed marketing decisions without proper analytics. Throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks might work, but how can you replicate that success if you don’t know why it stuck in the first place?
Analytics allow you to quantify the effects of making a change to your marketing strategy, and that’s invaluable to the process of improving and optimizing online marketing campaigns.
The biggest benefit of utilizing proper analytics is being able to identify strengths and weaknesses. For example, let’s say you run a blog for your car detailing business. You’re just starting out, and aren’t sure what kinds of posts will bring you the most traffic, or provide the most value to your readers.
If you’re using analytics, you’ll be able to measure which blog posts attract the most traffic, which get the least traffic, which have a high bounce rate, a low bounce rate, and so on. It will be easy to tell which blog posts are performing better or worse than others.
You can then take this information to further improve your blogging process. The more accurate your perception of what works and what doesn’t, the less time you’ll waste experimenting with blog topics that end up flopping.
Analytics essentially allow for a defined path of optimization that leads to better results on all fronts.
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WebFX has driven the following results for clients:
$6 billion
In client revenue
24 million
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7.14 million
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Start utilizing analytics today
Every day you’re on the web without analytics, you’re losing money. It’s as simple as that. There’s absolutely no reason to put off integrating analytics into your online marketing strategy, especially because everything you need to get started is 100% free through platforms like Google Analytics.
The beauty of using analytics is that you have complete control over how complex you want to get. You can have 20 custom dashboards set up in Google Analytics to track every single event case and user click on a page, or you can simply keep tabs on your best-performing landing pages. No matter your goal, there’s no scenario in which analytics aren’t helpful.
Depending on your traffic levels, you can have actionable analytics mere days after setting everything up. Google Analytics even has a “real time” feature that shows you who’s on your website as we speak!
Modern day analytics are essential to long-term growth and success that traditional marketers would have killed for. As long as you put in some work up front to get everything functioning, and to learn how to use the various analytic tools available, you will see returns on your efforts.
Learn how we increased traffic by over 40%, and conversions by over 100% for an ecommerce client.
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WebFX can help you use analytics to your advantage
If you’re looking to outsource your analytics work to a professional, we can help! We’re a full-service digital marketing agency with years of experience utilizing analytics to help our clients grow their revenue.
Our expert team of Internet marketers has been using platforms like Google Analytics from the very beginning, and we know what it takes to reach your business goals.
Contact us today for more information about our closed-loop analytics services, or give us a call at 888-601-8359 for a free quote!