The Analytics That Matter Most

One of the most important steps in helping you determine if your marketing strategy is producing the results you desire is to decide on which analytics matter most. You’ll have to know why you exist, what your goals are, and what data to collect to determine success or failure.

Understand Why You’re Doing “It”

Regardless of your marketing strategy, whether content marketing or social media marketing, Are you creating products to make the lives of your target market easier? Do you want more newsletter members? Are you trying to get sign-ups for a webinar? What exactly do you do, and why do you do it? Also, what do you want your website visitors to do when they get to your site?

Know Who You’re Doing It For

You need to know your target audience by describing a persona in terms of age, sex, job and income. Create two or three personas that you can address all marketing materials towards. This will help you to make better choices for content as well as create better products and/or services.

Set Benchmarks and Goals

Once you know what you’re doing, it is very important to set your goals, such as signing 100 new people up for your email list. But be sure that your goals are realistic and reachable. Setting your goals will make it easier for you to decide how to word your content, place your advertisements, where to locate sign-up boxes and more.

Collect the Data

Finally, you need to know what data to collect. There is more to a website than visitors to a page. You really want to track conversions based on your goals. How many people signed up for your newsletter due to the article you placed on that article marketing site? How many people signed up for and attended your webinar based on affiliate marketing efforts? How many people bought your book after reading an advertisement for it on Facebook?

Analyze the Data

The most important metrics are the ones that show progress toward your goals. You won’t succeed if you make zero conversions, no newsletter sign-ups, and no sales, even if you have a million site visitors. Those types of metrics say that the marketing you’re doing isn’t targeting the right people. If you have the type of sales and conversions you were looking for, then you can reasonable decide to do more of what is working and less of what is not to get even more conversions.

Google Analytics is the best tool to use. It’s free, easy to use and it works. There are others that you can use such as Spring Metrics, or Adobe SiteCatalyst. Those tools help you with test and target your site with A/B testing, and more. But these tools are quite expensive, so you need to use the free one first, which is Google Analytics. Then once you feel that you need more advanced features, you may use the others as you go.