Web analytics – and the good, the bad, and the ugly behind it all – is key to understanding and optimizing how people interact with your brand digitally. You can use the data you collect to get to know the people who interact with you or, better yet, the people who don’t interact with you. Likewise, analytics can help point you in the right direction for building relationships with these folks.
But first, you need solid, accurate data. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by data if you’re not careful, so we’ve put together a short list of tips to help you create a foundation for a clean and reliable data set and provide the right message at the right time to the right customer.
1. Keep it real.
Be realistic about your web analytics tools’ capabilities and your expectations of what they’ll deliver. We can be easily bamboozled by unrealistic promises that we really want to believe are possible. But don’t be fooled. You’ll only end up repeating those unrealistic expectations to the higher-ups, and when the tool inevitably doesn’t deliver, you’ll be the one who has to take responsibility for it—not the salespeople that sold you the tool.
2. Define in advance.
Doing the defining work in the beginning is critical. We discussed this last week in our blog post about identifying your business goals, key data points you’ll want to focus on, and more. You can read that here. As you’re defining, remember that you’ll want to start with your customers’ needs and work back from there.
In addition, remember that you’re dealing with different customers at different stages in the buying cycle who use different devices and come from different places. This will help you understand where to start to get the most from your analytics investments.
3. More isn’t always better.
Instead of trying to measure everything, look for high-quality data for those key data points you defined in #2. You want to collect and analyze data that maps to strategic business objectives.
Regardless of how much data you need, you want your data to be high quality—that is, data that’s applicable, analyzable and that you can have confidence in. In his post on good data vs. Big Data, Rudi Shumpert of Adobe Marketing Cloud suggests answering a few realistic questions to keep your data from exploding:
- Do you have the capacity to store the volume of data you intend on collecting?
- Can you create a platform that allows you to organize data in a way that permits generating useful reports?
- Does your company employ real data scientists who know how to deal with data sets of the appropriate scale and volume?
- Are you able to make sense of all that data before the next batch of data hits the servers?
4. When the data doesn’t balance, don’t freak out.
Since reporting methodologies between tools differ, you’ll inevitably see data discrepancies. For example, you might see discrepancy between your email system and your web analytics tool. Just make sure your data stays within an acceptable range and make decisions based on overall trends.
5. Make sure your data is accurate.
Since tags sometimes break or get duplicated, you’ll want to QA them. You can research the toolsets your web analytics tools offer for emergencies and prepare a response plan for those that pop up. In addition, we suggest conducting data audits to catch and manage data anomalies. There are several options available for automated tag checking and data quality audits such as ObservePoint and WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler).
6. Take action on what you’ve learned from the data.
The whole point of collecting data is to improve your marketing efforts. Once you’ve collected and analyzed the data, don’t forget to put the knowledge you’ve gained to work by translating the results into meaningful action that you then carry out.
Don’t let data overwhelm you. Instead, follow these digital analytics best practices to help focus on the data points that matter most. Use it to find critical segments of your target audience and identify key behavior patterns. You’ll begin to understand all the variables at play through practice and time.
Learn more about Filament and how we can help you create and execute effective digital marketing campaigns for your target audience.
