Analytics In Digital Marketing

Analytics allows us to collect and interpret a wealth of data in real-time, giving brands indispensable insight into the behaviour and preferences of their target audience.

Web analytics and social media analytics are the two pillars of modern marketing. Web analytics provide in-depth insights into how visitors interact with your website, from the number of visits to time spent on the site to conversion paths.

Social media analytics on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok allow you to track how content is shared and how your audience interacts with it.

Each of these platforms has unique characteristics that require different approaches to analysis.

Facebook and Instagram offer rich demographic data and insights into interactions such as likes, comments and shares to help you understand what content resonates most with your audience. LinkedIn provides insight into professional interactions and company reach, while YouTube and TikTok are invaluable resources for analysing video and its virality.

In this article, we’ll explore how different tools and metrics can help your business grow and adapt to a dynamically changing digital environment.

Let’s take a closer look at analytics in the digital space.

Web Analytics

The foundation of web analytics is tracking user interactions on a website. Using tools such as Google Analytics, marketers can gain insight into the number of visitors, how long they spend on a page and which sections are most popular.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tools. It offers several features that provide an in-depth look at different aspects of the web:

• Traffic analysis: Google Analytics provides data on the number of visitors, their geographic location, the devices and browsers they use, and the sources from which they come to the site.
• Behavioural metrics: The tool analyses how long visitors stay on the site, which pages they visit and how they interact with the site’s content. This includes click-throughs, time spent on each sub-page and interactions with page elements.
• Conversions and goals: Allows you to set and track goals, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, and provides insight into conversion rates and the paths that lead to successfully achieving those goals.

In addition to Google Analytics, other competing web analytics tools offer similar functionality. Let’s take a look at these three:

Adobe Analytics: This tool offers more detailed segmentation and more powerful analytics for large organisations, allowing for detailed data disaggregation and integration with other marketing technologies.

Matomo: An open-source alternative to Google Analytics, Matomo offers more control over data and privacy, as the data remains on the user’s servers.

Clicky: This tool is known for its ability to provide real-time data and a user-friendly interface, making it ideal for small and medium-sized businesses that need a simpler yet powerful analytics platform.

Let’s take a look at an extended list of key web analytics metrics you can track:

• Sessions: This metric tracks the number of unique interactions a visitor has with the site over a period of time. It helps assess overall traffic and engagement.
• Bounce rate: This shows the percentage of visits where users leave the site without ever going to another part of the site. A low immediate bounce rate indicates that the content is relevant and engaging.
• Time Spent on Page (Average Session Duration): This metric indicates the average amount of time visitors spent on the page during their visit. It is useful for assessing the interest and value of content.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): The ratio of clicks on a link to the number of impressions. A high CTR can indicate effective calls to action and effective advertising campaigns.
• Downloads: measures the number of file downloads from your site. This metric is important for sites that offer digital products or resources such as white papers, applications or software packages.
• Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who took a desired action, such as purchasing a product, registering or filling out a form. It is a key indicator of the success of your landing pages and marketing campaigns.
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). This metric is useful for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
• ROI (Return on Investment): The profit ratio generated from investment in marketing activities. It provides an overall picture of the financial return on investment.
• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): The cost of acquiring a customer. It is important for optimising marketing strategies and budgets.
• CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions): The cost per thousand impressions of an advertisement. This metric is fundamental to awareness-based media campaigns.
• CPC (cost per click): The price you pay for each click on your ad. This is important for assessing the cost-effectiveness of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
• Users: The number of unique users who have visited your website. It provides an insight into the size of your audience.
• New vs. returning visitors: Distinguishes between new and returning users, helping you to understand loyalty and repeat engagement.
• Pages per Visit (Pages per Session): the average number of pages visitors view during a single visit. A higher number may indicate higher engagement.
• Top Pages: This feature identifies the pages with the highest number of visits, which may indicate which content interests users most.
• Geolocation of users: shows where your visitors are coming from, which can help with geo-targeted marketing strategies.
• Traffic Sources: Break down traffic by sources, such as direct visits, links from other sites, social media or organic search.

These metrics provide a comprehensive view of site performance, user behaviour and marketing effectiveness.

However, specific metrics can also be useful depending on the particular goals and needs of the site. Here are some of them:

• Content Interactions: tracks actions such as button clicks, video plays or interactions with games and applications on the site.
• Product page exit rate: This is specific to e-commerce sites. It tracks the percentage of visitors who leave the site without interacting or making a purchase.
• Social Shares: The rate at which visitors share website content on social networks.
• Organic search share: The percentage of traffic that comes from organic search.
• Form abandonment rate: Tracks how many users start to fill out a form but don’t submit it.
• Page views to impressions ratio: Use this metric to determine how many times your pages have been viewed compared to the number of impressions.
• Email engagement rate: By integrating email campaign analytics, you can track how effectively your emails engage recipients.

Analytics for e-shops

The success of an e-commerce store also depends on a thorough understanding of the customer journey and conversions. Tools such as Google Analytics provide insight into which products are most popular, as well as shopping basket and final purchase data, allowing you to optimise marketing strategies and increase sales.

To enhance the analytical capabilities of e-commerce platforms, a range of tools, from user behaviour analysis to detailed marketing performance reporting, are available.

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular tools that can help your e-commerce store grow with their analytics:

• Google Analytics: An essential tool in the world of analytics, Google Analytics provides a comprehensive view of traffic and user behaviour on your e-commerce site. It allows you to track sales performance, understand customer journeys and measure conversion rates, making it an ideal tool for businesses starting with analytics.
• Omnisend: This tool focuses on integrating your marketing channels and automating custom workflows. It’s particularly useful for analysing your website’s email marketing campaigns and customer behaviour.
• Glassbox: Offering advanced customer experience analytics, Glassbox helps you visualise and understand user interactions on your website through features such as session replay. This tool is excellent for identifying pain points and optimising the user experience.
• Glew.io: Provides a wide range of analytics, from sales data to customer segmentation and performance across multiple platforms. It is suitable for medium-to-large e-commerce stores that need to collect data from various sources.
• Supermetrics: Efficiently centralises data from multiple marketing channels in one place. It enables easier analysis of marketing campaigns.
• Woopra: Specializing in real-time analytics, Woopra helps understand customer behaviour across multiple touch points.
• Hotjar: An excellent tool for visually understanding how visitors interact with your website. It provides heat maps showing where visitors are most focused and where they click. It also provides a record of actual visitor activity, allowing you to track their movement around the site. These features are invaluable for identifying site weaknesses, allowing you to optimise design and element placement to increase engagement and conversions.

Cookies and analytics

Cookies are small text files that websites store on a visitor’s computer or mobile device. Cookies allow a website to remember information about visitors, such as their preferences or shopping basket contents.

In the context of analytics, cookies are invaluable because they allow you to track user activity on the site. This tracking includes collecting data on how long users stay on a particular page, which pages they visit, and what actions they take. This information is crucial to improving the user experience and optimising the site’s content.

Analytics for mobile apps

Mobile apps offer unique metrics such as user retention, time spent on the app and user activity. Meta (Facebook) pixels track user actions, which can be used to target ads and personalise marketing campaigns. Google Analytics, on the other hand, provides detailed information about user behaviour within the app, such as conversion and engagement rates.

Other recommended mobile analytics tools:

• Mixpanel: Provides extensive capabilities for tracking user interactions and analysing in-app behaviour. It allows you to measure conversion rates and provides detailed reports on how users interact with different app features, which is useful for improving user experience and increasing engagement.
• Firebase Analytics: Integrated with Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics is designed specifically for mobile apps. It provides event tracking, user engagement analysis and allows developers to gain deeper insights into how apps are used. Firebase also helps identify and analyse app bugs.
• Flurry Analytics: This tool provides a comprehensive analysis of user behaviour and demographics. It allows you to view app usage trends, retention rates, user activity and many other metrics.
• App Annie: Focuses more on market data and competitive analysis, providing useful insights into market trends, app ratings and competitor behaviour.

Analytics on social platforms

In the next section of this article, we’ll examine the analytics capabilities of some of the most popular social platforms.

Facebook and Instagram

These platforms provide detailed demographic data and interactions such as likes, comments and shares. By analysing this data, you can better understand what resonates with your target audience and how to tailor content to increase audience engagement. Using Meta Business Suite brings new depth to this process.

Meta Business Suite and its analytical tools

• Creative Reporting: This tool allows you to analyse in detail which creative elements in your ads appeal most to your audience.
• Experiments: Experimentation helps us test different ad versions to determine the most effective.
• Insights: Provides key demographic and behavioural data to understand your target audience better.
• Meta Brand Collabs Manager: Facilitates influencer collaborations and extends the reach of campaigns.
• Traffic Analysis Report: Analyses movement and interactions on profiles and pages.
• Ad Reporting: It provides detailed information on the performance and effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

LinkedIn

A platform for a professional audience. LinkedIn provides analytics focused on the effectiveness of content for career development and business opportunities.

It offers specialised analytics tools tailored to the needs of both businesses and individuals.

LinkedIn analytics by target group:

• For Company Profiles: This tool allows businesses to track various aspects of their online presence. It includes analyses of reach, engagement, and follower demographics, allowing brands to optimise their content strategies and better target their campaigns.
• For individual profiles: These provide insight into who views your profile and analyse interactions with your posts. This information is useful for individuals looking to improve their visibility and networking opportunities on the platform.

For a more in-depth analysis of your LinkedIn profile, you can also use competing tools such as Hootsuite or Keyhole. These tools offer advanced analytics for tracking LinkedIn performance, including engagement, follower growth, and post-performance.

YouTube Analytics

YouTube Analytics gives you detailed reports on video viewership, traffic sources and geographic distribution. This data is key to optimising your content and targeting your ads to the right audience.

Key tools and metrics provided by YouTube Analytics include:

• Watch Time Reports: Displays aggregated data on views, watch time, and new subscriber acquisition rates.
• Demographics: It provides information about the age, gender and geographic location of viewers. Image. YouTube Analytics
• Traffic Sources: Analyses where viewers are coming from, including direct links, YouTube searches and other external sources
• Engagement Reports: Tracks likes, dislikes, comments and shares, providing insight into viewer engagement levels

TikTok

The fast-growing TikTok platform provides data on the virality of content, which is key for brands looking to engage with younger demographics in particular.

TikTok offers analytics tools for corporate accounts, allowing brands to understand their influence within the platform better.

TikTok Analytics provides the following key metrics:

• Overview tab: Provides a quick overview of profile performance, including video views, number of viewers, and profile views
• Content insights: It analyses each video in detail, providing data on the number of views, likes, comments, shares, and hours when the video was most watched.
• Follower Insights: Provides analysis of follower demographics, their geographic distribution and when they are most active.

In this article, we will only discuss a few platforms that specifically meet these user needs:

• Universal accessibility and usage: These platforms are among the most widely used in the world and cover a wide range of demographics
• Marketing reach: They offer excellent tools for targeting and reaching potential customers, which is key to effective marketing campaigns
• Content diversity: They allow the publication of different types of content (text, images, video), which makes it possible to analyse various forms of interaction
• Analytical tools: Each of these platforms offers comprehensive and advanced analytics tools to help brands improve their marketing strategies

In this article, we have focused on the choice of analytics specifically for platforms such as Web, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok for the following reasons:

• Universal accessibility and usage: these platforms are among the most widely used worldwide and cover a wide range of demographics.
• Marketing reach: They offer excellent tools for targeting and reaching potential customers, which is key to effective marketing campaigns
• Content diversity: They allow the publication of different types of content (text, images, video), which makes it possible to analyse different forms of interaction
• Analytical tools: Each of these platforms offers extensive and advanced analytical tools to help brands improve their marketing strategies

To broaden the topic, we could also include the following platforms:

• Twitter: a platform that allows the tracking of trends, hashtags and real-time interactions, ideal for analysing immediate reactions to events and brand communications
• Pinterest: of interest to brands with visually oriented content, offering tools to analyse trends and preferences in lifestyle and consumption patterns
• Snapchat: Important for targeting younger audiences, offers unique metrics for analysing the effectiveness of story and video content
• Reddit: A platform that provides deep insight into opinions and discussions in very specific communities, useful for detailed sentiment and trend analysis.

Ethics and privacy in analytics

Brands need to protect customers’ personal data in a transparent and GDPR-compliant way, which includes setting cookies. Clarifying how data is used and what customers can control is essential to building trust in a brand.

Brands should be as transparent as possible with customers about what data they collect, what they use it for and how it is protected. This approach not only builds customer trust but is also a fundamental requirement of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. Customers should be able to easily find and understand your privacy policy and be informed of any changes to how their personal data is processed.

Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence in the digital environment

Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google AI (Gemini), or Microsoft AI (Copilot) enable companies to analyse and predict consumer behaviour effectively. These tools help brands optimise their marketing strategies and increase their competitiveness.

Analytics in SEO

From an analytics perspective, let’s divide SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) into several key areas.

Analyse keywords and their performance: Tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs allow detailed analysis of keywords, including their search volume, competitiveness and effectiveness in the context of page content. This analysis is the basis for optimising content and improving search engine visibility.

Backlink analysis reports: Tools such as Majestic provide backlink analysis, allowing you to assess the quality and relevance of these links.

Page load speed analysis: Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights provide page load speed analysis and recommendations for improvement.

UX (user experience) analytics: Hotjar and similar tools allow you to visualise user interactions on websites, providing heatmaps and session records. This analytical data is invaluable for identifying problem areas and improving the user experience.

The impact of analytics on digital marketing

The correct use of data analytics has a major impact on the success of an online strategy, from understanding visitor behaviour on websites to tracking social media interactions to predictive analysis of consumer behaviour.

All of these approaches to data analysis are essential to modern digital marketing.

Integrating analytics tools offers you countless opportunities to measure and optimise your online activities. Not only can you effectively track the ROI of your campaigns, but you can also respond flexibly to changing trends and customer preferences.

In today’s fast-paced world, analytics is the key to understanding and anticipating market needs.