Assessing Business Need
The need for Digital Analytics varies from business to business. Businesses can be adopting analytics tools for the first time or very likely looking to adopt a commercial tool moving away from homegrown tools. It is important to assess the requirements, what business goal needs to be achieved, what data needs to be analyzed and why. Having clarity on requirements helps to choose the tool that is right for the business. Having clarity on requirements helps to assess the features of the tools to find the right fit.
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Data Integration
Digital Analytics software should support multi-channel data integration capabilities and should align with the channel strategy of the business. It should preferably provide out-of-the-box data connectors that would reduce integration efforts and improve time to value. Also, it should support the scale, reliability and performance needs of the organization.
Customization
No two organizations’ needs are the same when it comes to analytics. Customization is a very common need for business, Digital Analytics should support customization capabilities around metrics, views, dashboards, and reports.
Total Cost of Ownership
Businesses need to analyze the overall cost of owning and maintaining a digital analytics solution. It not only involves the software cost ( subscription or otherwise), but also includes the cost of additional services around customization, training, and support. Some more advanced analytics platforms would require additional skilled workforce - the cost of hiring and training such personnel need to be factored into.
Training and Support
Usage of the Digital Analytics tool requires ongoing support from the vendor. Even with the most user-friendly tools, users are likely to hit technical difficulties or would need some level of ongoing customization. It is important to assess the support provided by the vendor - online chat, 24/7 support, online case submission or enterprise support requirements like dedicated customer support executive.
Ease of Use
This is a critical need as business users will be one of the key users of the solution. Also, the effort required to administer, configure, setup and maintain should be well within the limits of what companies can afford.
What are the Challenges in Adopting Digital Analytics Software?
Lack of Real-Time Tracking
Digital Analytics software doesn’t always offer data tracking in real-time. Tracking is done in limited real-time functions (such as the number of visitors currently on the site) along with aggregated data in delayed batches. For many Digital Analytics software, data results often take up 24 hours to process, and this can be too late for businesses that need to respond more quickly.
Non-Integrated Mobile Analytics
Some companies need to track digital analytics from their mobile properties in addition to their websites, and this can often require special Software Development Kits which need to be implemented and configured.
Lack of Customizable Metrics
While many Digital Analytics software offer a variety of measurable metrics and reporting templates, some do not offer measurement or reporting customization. Products that do offer this level of customization tend to be more expensive, and need time to integrate.
Under-Utilization of Features
Most Digital Analytics software provide a set of dashboards that offer views of landing page performance, user behavior and more. While customization is available to some extent using a drag and drop interface, at most times, implementation of these dashboards requires skills that are beyond the abilities of business users. As a result, many features of Digital Analytics software tend to be under-utilized.
Constant Data Management
While Digital Analytics software is designed to capture data from all data sources, it is still a task to ensure that all the data sources are being captured and attributed accurately. Also as a business evolves, there is always new data to be brought in and this task of identifying, capturing and attributing sources on a constant basis can be a stumbling block for many businesses.
Ensuring Data Security
Most Data Analytics software come with a standardized data security system and in-built security parameters. But for larger enterprises, it is essential to have additional protection for critical data.
ROI of Digital Analytics Software
Measuring Return on Investment (RoI) across marketing campaigns and online properties are one of the key capabilities of Digital Analytics software. Digital Analytics software enables your business to better know its efficiencies and inefficiencies and optimize the latter saving time and money, down the line.
Let’s delve into some of the specific ways this can happen:
Monetizing Visitors
Customers come in all shapes and sizes, and Digital Analytics software can help uncover pockets of potential customers that may have never been considered. By tracking extensive user data, marketing departments can discover untapped markets or gain insights into how to derive business value from new customers.
Ensure Optimal Site Performance
Digital Analytics software keeps web developers on top of site performance metrics, ensuring there is limited downtime, and therefore minimizing losses due to failed pages, and checkouts.
Moving the Conversion Needle
Digital Analytics software offers teams a measurable way to improve metrics on the website, mobile site or mobile app in order to move users along the path to purchase. By understanding the conversion metrics that help this decision-making process, marketing teams can make positive changes to convert more, resulting in increased sales.
Cost Per Lead
Digital Analytics software enables marketing teams to be able to unify and attribute their cost per leads in one view. By determining the costs of conversion or plugging in the product sales numbers, business users can measure the Cost Per Lead and drill down the reports by geography, campaign, browser, keyword and more. This gives the marketing team multiple areas to bring down the cost per lead saving money, and identify new sources of marketing opportunity, all of which have a tremendous impact on the bottom line.