Sherlock Holmes demanded information before he takes any step. Achieving business goals through online marketing is not less than solving a puzzle. For years marketers primarily focused on detailed market research to help the product reach its target audience. And, today through different tools data on customer behavior is acquired. This helps us to predict the performance of a business and update/modify accordingly.
In this process, web analytics plays a major role when it comes to online marketing. They provide complete details of web traffic and visitor behavior. It is way more than installing the script on the website. Web analytics gives an understanding of the technical aspects of online marketing.
When online marketing began in the early 1990s, the central idea to “deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time”. This was a challenge in itself. It demands research into what the users look for and what they need from a specific online page.
Web analytics tool available today gives insights of a business to improve their advertising and marketing performance. It provides both qualitative and quantitative measurement of the audience behavior. This information can be used to promote a personalized user experience and meet the user’s needs and expectations.
Web Analytics collects data in three different levels:
- First-party data is acquiring employing the first-party cookie on the web browser of the user/visitor.
- Second-party data is gathered from the business partner through a first-party cookie as shared with another party.
- Third-party data uses third-party cookies that follow internet users and gather behavioral data.
This is a robust ecosystem of data and analytics tool which includes search analytics, social media engagement, and social media monitoring. It is designed to truly comprehend the magnitude of what data generation can do to a business by collecting the data in real-time.
The analyzed customer data is key to driving online marketing. They allow customers to arrange marketing campaigns, initiatives, and schedules as per the observed behavior.
The advanced capabilities of web analytics help the admin understand audience with user attributes, visitors through media pages, etc., It is reported that a large number of organizations within the Fortune 100, have used web analytics to increase performance and enhance efficiency by optimizing and re-targeting.
The emergence of this data analytics in the competitive landscape is indeed an innovation. Moreover, owned assets offer a wide range of options including acquiring competitive intelligence, a testing site for Search Engine Optimization, and quality data. The paid version of the tools also allows identifying competitors and the sources through which their traffic is driven. In the same way, scraping Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) like those of Google and Bing is another massive resource of data, waiting to be extracted and analyzed, to give insights about happenings across the online marketplace.
These high-value reports not only provide in-depth analysis of web audiences but information to manage social platforms, conversion analytics, and keyword engagement analysis.
With the explosion, online media led to the explosion of data, and then the web analytics to determine every step strategically. Before you implement it is imperative that you outline the change you are aiming for.
