In last week’s article, we dissected the importance of having a digital presence as a business. We will step it up a notch today and focus on digital data and analytics as a critical driver of business growth, particularly in the digital spectrum.
Some reports have made the accession that, the average user has over 2,500 interactions a day and spends about 800 hours a year on their mobile device. This is such an unbelievable true statistic, one which was most likely not imaged when the first mobile phone was launched in 1982 by Nokia.
Questions digital analytics can help you answer include:
- What caused a decline in customer conversion?
- How can the team increase conversion? (PS: ultimately increasing revenue)
- Which marketing channels should we invest more in?
- Who are our target customers? (Investigates customer behavior)
- Which products sell more?
Some benefits of digital analytics:
- A better understanding of your customers
Buyer behaviors and demographics can all be used to enable you to better serve your customers.
- Optimize your marketing
Data is trivial in any marketing efforts and as such, digital analytics empower you with knowing how and where to capitalize on your marketing. For instance, if you have more website viewers for a campaign from Mbabane, you may want to have more ad spend there than say, Nhlangano.
- Predict the future
With the right kind and amount of data, you can easily improvise for improvements by predicting the future. For instance, if you ran a Black Friday campaign this year, you can use that data to predict future sales in the next year.
- Rigorous experimentation
I’m a big fan of A/B Testing and digital data and analytics empower you with the ability to not only fix existing problems but to also find new opportunities for revenue in your business as reported that 46% of businesses take advantage of this.
Website metrics that matter:
- Conversion Rate - it assesses the effectiveness of marketing initiatives with a financial bearing.
- Engagement Rate - it provides information about the popularity and interest of your website's audience as well as their level of activity.
- Bounce Rate - it reveals how effectively your website satisfies visitor expectations. A high bounce rate may potentially indicate a fault or inaccuracy elsewhere. Your page's health can be gauged by lowering your bounce rate and keeping it within the industry norm.
- Click-through Rate (CTR) - it reveals the effectiveness of particular campaigns or pages. In paid advertising, it is a crucial metric to monitor.
- Most visited pages
- Visitor frequency - gauges your customer’s loyalty and can be used to calculate the lifetime value of a customer.
- Visitor demographics - these can help with personalized campaigns and product offerings as they collect demographic data such as age, gender, location, interests, etc.
The old adage by Lord Kelvin cannot be more accurate, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it”. Using this as a rule of thumb will help you drive massive business success in this digital world. I’d be keen to hear about how your business has adopted data analytics for success and even some key challenges in the local business ecosystem. Feel free to reach out to me via email at thuba.mamba@codeswatini.org.