Track to the future

September 18, 2017

Analytics ,

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and by future, we mean today.

Analytics, tracking, and tagging are words synonymous with digital marketing. However, we often find that a lot of businesses aren’t entirely aware of information that either could be or is actually at their fingertips. Which then leads to the question:

How much of your businesses own information are you ignoring simply because you don’t know it’s there?

A recent Econsultancy report found that:

“66% of all companies believe that siloed data prevents them from making the most effective use of their marketing.”

It’s 2017. We can take a ride in a car with no driver, order food from a robot and actually walk with dinosaurs (ok, maybe not actually, but VR has come a long way). We should be able to understand what is going on within our own digital space.   There is an abundance of tech available, and the ever sought after true holistic marketing view is no longer a myth.

There is a whole host of great platforms and tools which open up new opportunities and capabilities which allow your business to intelligently capture, store, and utilize data. Often it can be hard to put a single label on a platform, as they often morph into multi-purpose tech stacks.  Add to the fact that a lot of these platforms plug into one another, and you can see how it sometimes hard to tell where they begin and end.

Below we suggest a couple of tools which can help unlock the marketing productivity potential for any business.

Web Analytics – Analytics From the Web 📊

Real time analytics data - Daily viewers

Web analytics platforms and services, like Google Analytics, are great ways to track and report on all your web activity. There are paid for services which come with in-depth, advanced functionality. However, for the vast majority of businesses, the free versions available will do just fine. They are fairly easy to set up, however, in saying that, setting them up correctly can be completely different story.

One of the first things we look to do when taking on a new client is to ensure their analytics is properly set up as it acts as the backbone of truth. Without the correct setup, you won’t capture the right information and the tool then starts losing its purpose. Having this set up correctly from the start will save you the hassle and headache of doing it later.

Attribution – The Cut of The Prize 🍩

Analytics data picture showing an attribution model

Supplementing the web analytics platforms, attribution vendors provide software that helps businesses understand what marketing touch points a user interacted with on their user journey. They allow you to judge each channels contribution to a conversion on its journey so you can accurately allocate budget between them.

Now you don’t necessarily need an attribution vendor to start assessing the contributions of your digital marketing channels. By having tracking tags implemented across all of your sites, you can start gathering and building an idea of what is working well. The only downside is you are probably still assessing your efforts on the most common seen last click attribution model, where 100% of the conversion credit is given to the channel which provided the last click before the conversion.

With an attribution vendor, you go beyond just click-based interactions and touch upon everything that might have influenced a consumer to convert on site. The insights deduced from this data are the hard facts needed to justify an accurate marketing budget split.

Audience Insight & Data Management Platforms – The Who 🔮

Analytics graph showing multiple channels audience and insights

With multiple channels driving traffic to a site it can be handy to understand exactly who these users are, what differentiates them between the channels and what worth they are to your business.

Audience insight tools and data management platforms are great for this purpose. The big name ad platforms like Google and Facebook come with these insight tools baked in within, providing this information based on 1st party data. They usually provide you with insight into who you are reaching and are good in assessing the value of those individuals to you, through that specific channel.

Data management platforms (DMPs) are essentially data warehouses that can store and analyze customer information. Think of them as a single hub of truth where you can store 1st, 2nd, & 3rd party data in addition to ingesting CRM data. You are then able to make actionable decisions off the back by pushing it out into your demand-side platforms (DSPs). It’s about building relevant audience profiles, remarketing to the appropriate individuals and building bespoke/dynamic creative for each of the different audiences.

Through proper use of analytics tools, businesses are able to understand their audiences, tailor the experience and ultimately streamline all marketing efforts which in the end results in savings and efficiencies gained across the board. It allows you to reduce time to conversion whilst also improving brand analysis. What better retention strategy is there than exceeding the expectations of the consumer with the product or service you provide by utilising the data given to you.

How We Do 💪

Tailored Solutions

At Harvest, we have adapted and built tailored solutions for a number of our clients across different verticals each coming with their own challenges.  Most commonly this is done to quantify all aspect of the conversion process, which could be anything from tying up the online and offline conversion funnels to simply integrating calls and call centers within the marketing platforms.

Being able to see where a user started their journey, what online influences guided them to a website, how much value is associated with that consumer and what characteristics they share with others who visit your site is extremely powerful information.

As with everything, there isn’t a cookie cutter, one size fits all approach that you can just set up for all types of businesses. There sometimes can be limitations to what can be implemented for a business based on a range of internal/external factors such as nature of service, government regulations, and website build.

Additionally, these tools and platforms are not going to act as magic fixes to wider issues. What they will do is provide you with the capability to find the solutions at a faster pace by unlocking a full unobstructed view of your situation.

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