What is Digital Analytics?
Digital Analytics describes a wide ecosystem that utilizes qualitative and quantitative data from both your own business and that of your competitors. This analysis informs the continual improvement of the customer experiences of your brand’s touchpoints.
[Adapted from Google’s own Avinash Kaushik]
What Separates the Good from the Bad?
Data analysts and database managers the world over are deeply connected by the truism: “trash in; trash out”. The quality of the data you collect is critical to the outcomes you can achieve with it. Digital Analytics relies on the same core need: excellent data.
What can Digital Analytics Do for You?
Digital Analytics is all about measuring and interpreting data. It often supports online marketing to measure the effectiveness of strategies used to improve the visibility of your website.
Common marketing strategies that provide the data are (but are not restricted to):
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
To assist you in understanding the power of implementing Digital Analytics, we will consider just one use case.
Case Study: AccuWeather
The most convincing reason to undertake a digital transformation journey, such as implementing Digital Analytics, is to understand some of the potential outcomes.
One of our favorite examples comes from Google’s case studies, that of AccuWeather.
The Digital Analytics Challenge
AccuWeather wanted to improve consumer uptake of their weather forecast email alerts and track campaigns.
The Problem
To improve a metric, you must be able to measure that metric. And, AccuWeather had tried! Some campaigns attempted to use QR codes or custom, short URLs to redirect users to various mobile app stores. However, the data collection implementation was always unsatisfactory. A particular challenge was that customers interacted with the brand from devices that did not support JavaScript, which was typically a core component of the tracking solution.
AccuWeather needed:
- full visibility over the effectiveness of weather forecast emails
- to be able to attribute credit to campaigns that drove users to app store pages
- to gain deeper insight into AccuWeather’s mobile touchpoints
The Solution
In AccuWeather’s case, they applied Google Analytics Premium. They implemented the Measurement Protocol feature to feed user data directly into Google Analytics premium.
The Outcome
With their Digital Analytics strategy in place:
- When a user interacts with the brand by opening an email alert, that data is reliably collected.
- Brand interactions via app stores are now reliably collected.
- Traffic is captured even on mobile devices that have disabled (or don’t support) JavaScript.
AccuWeather is now better informed with regards to its email engagement metrics. The issue of tracking hits without negatively affecting the user’s experience in app stores is solved. Finally, and importantly, data that was previously lost due to a lack of JavaScript support on mobile devices is now collected.
Interested to Learn More?
This is the briefest consideration of what Digital Analytics can do for just one business use case to improve a company’s ability to understand its audience and customize its monetization strategy.
In fact, the toolset considered in this example, Google Analytics Premium, can do far more than collect users’ email, in-app, or on-site data. Google Analytics Premium is an excellent Digital Analytics solution that can also collate kiosk and point-of-sale data, making it a practical choice for many business cases.
However, here at e-CENS, we are tool agnostic; we recommend the best toolset to fit your budget, roadmap, and long-term strategy.
If you want to learn more about Digital Analytics, e-CENS provides training to support marketing, analytics, and technology professionals who are just starting out as well as for those who are ready to perform more advanced analytics and operations. If you are ready to begin your Digital Transformation journey with a trusted partner, then contact us to learn more.
