If you’ve followed along with our blog, you’re familiar with how much we rely on data. It informs media strategy, tells us who your audience is, what marketing platforms are best, what locations to target, and so much more. With digital media being a leading marketing option and resource for both small and major business alike, how can you get your hands on the data that informs your marketing strategy?

Here is where web analytics come into play. Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing your site. In addition to serving as your landing page or sales tool, your website is collecting data 24/7 to uncover insights that can help you not only understand how your users behave on your site, but also why your users behave this way, and what action to take based on these insights.

Using a tool like Google Analytics is the fastest and most direct way to take your marketing plans from estimated guess to informed decision based on real data. Here are five reasons you should be studying your analytics before you design your media strategy or plan:

Tracking Metrics

Google Analytics monitors where your web traffic is coming from, such as via SEO, PPC, social media, referrals or direct traffic. By monitoring how your visitors are finding your business, you can take note of how your ads are performing to maximize your social media strategy and adjust as needed. Be sure to incorporate goals in GA, to measure how campaigns are performing in regards to marketing objectives.

Audience

Your analytics also track qualitative and quantitative data about the visitors to your website, a main tool in understanding your customers. With breakdowns of age, gender, interests and geo-location, you can optimize media buys to target those who are most likely to convert. It also grants the opportunity to look at the quality of your marketing content and strategy to ensure you are reaching your target audience where they consume their media.

Behavior and Interests

While this information is also found under the Audience tab in Google Analytics, it is an important one to call out. The Behavior section includes detailed category reports such as new vs. returning visitors, frequency and engagement once on your site. These reports tell you more about how often a visitor comes to your website, how many days on average it is between sessions for repeat visitors, how long visitors stay on your website and how many pages they visit while they’re there. By tracking the behavioral patterns of visitors who are most likely to convert, you’ll learn information such as if you’re most likely to get the most conversions on a visitor’s first visit or returning visits, and if your marketing funnel is optimized.

Improve Site

The goal of your website is to create new customers, but if your website is not user-friendly, lacks information, is not engaging, etc., then it is not fully doing its job. By tracking how long people are spending on each page plus how much traffic each page receives, you’re able to improve your resources and results to create more business. For example, if visitors are only spending a few seconds on a page you believe to be useful, maybe the copy needs adjusting, or the page needs a redesign for higher impact. By analyzing this user flow, you can follow visitors from the starting page through as many interactions as they make or pages they view on your site.

Mobile Visitors

Since more than half of all web traffic is mobile and predicted to increate another 25% by 2025, it is key to track how much of your traffic is accessed from mobile devices. This data helps inform your marketing plans and the budgeted marketing push via mobile devices. Also, by ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly, you may be more likely to convert customers by making the experience more engaging.

Pinpointing audiences, marketing platforms, etc. is not an estimated guess. It is a science based on data and experience. It starts with your business goals, reviewing relevant data available via analytics, drawing conclusions from that data and converting it into actionable insights to planning your strategy. It allows you to measure your success, adjust and repeat for the most successful outcomes. With more than 23 years of using hard information to create media plans and buys for our clients, data-driven strategy is what our team at Morgan & Co. does best. Contact us if you’re ready to utilize these insights to fuel your company’s growth in 2021 and beyond.