How to Make Data-Driven Decisions Using Analytics

If you want to create effective and successful marketing campaigns, you need to make sure they’re planned well. They should target the right audience, appeal to them, and encourage them to convert. For this to happen, you need to conduct thorough research during the planning process and during the campaign period. Your website and online handles will generate ample data and this information needs to be collected and analyzed. There are several analytics tools that can help you do so, here are some key ways to examine your data.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tools available today and many people use it regularly to monitor activity on their website. This tool measures website traffic, traffic sources, conversion rates, sales, and other related data. The basic version of this tool is available free of cost while the premium version is available for a small fee.

You can use Analytics to constantly monitor the activity on your website so you can understand how your customers move and interact with your website. This allows you to plan and refine your marketing campaigns accordingly. Google Analytics works with almost all website platforms and can provide relevant data for your blogs, ecommerce websites, or company websites.

UTM Tags

UTM tags or Urchin Tracking Module is designed to work with Google Analytics and helps you keep track of all your marketing campaigns. The UTM tag is a very simple line of coding that’s attached to the URL of the website. It will track the source, medium, as well as the campaign name.

In simple terms, it will allow Google Analytics to determine where your customers came from, through which device, and which campaign brought them to your website. As you can guess, this will tell you which campaigns are more effective and successful and which need to be altered or removed entirely.

You can also create a vanity URL through this code to track your offline campaigns like TV and magazine ads, radio marketing, newspaper ads, etc. This is a custom URL for your offline campaigns and will direct customers to your main website, but will also tell you how effective your offline campaigns are.

Pivot Tables

Pivot Tables are a special feature in spreadsheets and data procession programs that allow you to summarize and analyze data effectively. It also shows how one set of data interacts with other and helps you arrive at the right conclusions. Pivot Tables automatically sort all the numbers entered in your spreadsheet and will give you totals, averages, and percentages of the information entered. This helps you decipher raw data and get pertinent information from it.

Facebook Analytics

Facebook also provides a comprehensive analytics platform that allows you to monitor activity of your company profile page, user page, as well as ad campaigns. All administrators of your company fan page can access and analyze the data provided in this platform and use the information to refine marketing campaigns and social media marketing.

Using these tools, you’ll be able to collect and understand data generated by traffic to  your website, which will help you optimize your marketing campaign’s efficiency.