12 important aspects of Digital Analytics – A Checklist: We all know that analytics uses quantitative methods to derive meaning from data for businesses to make informed business decisions. Intelligent and informed decisions lead to increased revenues and improved operational efficiency.
But despite all your efforts, you might have hit some bumps. As we well know, digital analytics is not just about making fancy charts, graphs and reports. It is all about analyzing these visual representations of the data that a business has, to spot all the gaps in performance. The next step is to then formulate a sound strategy that works.
In order for your analytics to fully kick in and do its magic on your data, there are some aspects that need to be taken into account.
Here is a checklist – for you to use to see if you have covered all bases.
- Have you clearly listed your goals? What do you hope to achieve? Are you trying to sell more of your product or services? Or are you trying to improve a certain function in your business?
- Have you defined key performance indicators once you know what your goals are? (Key performance indicators come in handy when you need to track and measure your efforts to see if you are indeed progressing in the right direction)
- Have you broken goals and your performance indicators into measurable actions – things you can do and subsequently measure?
- How about the tool? Have you picked the right tool for your arsenal? It would help to remember that it would all depend on your industry, your requirements, and various other factors, including data privacy and how you handle sensitive information about customers.
- While choosing your tool and building your analytics solution, did you ensure that it is flexible enough to accommodate future requirements and can stretch to accommodate scale?
- Once you got your tool, did you clearly define your expectations from it? (this would be very closely interlinked with the goals you set when you decided you wanted analytics in the system)
- Did you prioritize the list of features that you want to leverage once you implement it?
- It is important to define project / Implementation exclusions – what you don’t want to be included in your analysis of the data that you have.
- The UI, the various views, and the filters need to have been configured carefully
- Did you define who will use it? Give permission to only those who will need access to it? This is a vital aspect that needs to be checked, as anything can go wrong if the wrong people have access and the power to change basic settings.
- Dashboards, the segments, and the custom reports for each data view need to be created and checked.
- And make sure that every time you have a change in your goals or strategy, you make the corresponding changes in the tool as well so you can measure the effectiveness of it.
Data Analytics can help you make informed decisions that will lead to better outcomes. Eliminating guesswork will lead to effective marketing efforts. You understand and truly know your customers and so you can tailor your content and offerings to truly meet their needs. But for that, you need to track the entire customer journey – from leads right up to conversions. Only then can you truly understand customer behavior and also micro-segment your entire audience.
An important question it really helps to ask is if we are able to get a total, complete picture. The most prevalent problem in a digital analytics setup is a complete lack of correct cross-domain or subdomain tracking. This will affect everything.
And through it all, it is very important to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. Effective competitor analysis goes a long way in firmly establishing your brand in the market.
Digital data and analytics management is crucial to managing data and deriving valuable insights from it. You might have the fanciest tool that can handle the sharpest modeling in the market. But it takes some careful planning and implementation to achieve the goals that you intended to achieve as you set out on this digital analytics journey.
There are times when you have a great analytics system in place and you track your website and your app, your portal, and your campaigns. You do what it takes to understand customer behavior. You even want to personalize your engagement with each of them and put a personalization tool in place. But the numbers are still plummeting. Ever wonder why?
We all know that analytics uses quantitative methods to derive meaning from data for businesses to make informed business decisions.
Watch this space … we’ll tell you why!
Do share your views with us on various aspects of Digital Analytics by writing to marketingfolks@xerago.com
