Digital Analytics Software 2020: Complete Guide

Digital Analytics is now a key part of the digital marketing strategy of a company. With many organizations adopting digital transformation and almost every business having an online presence in some form or the other, digital marketing is gaining traction in leaps and bounds. Digital operations of a company now cover many aspects, companies adopt the omnichannel strategy and a very high volume of data gets generated from all these activities. These now include social media marketing, email, and marketing automation, search engine optimization, retargeting campaigns, digital advertising campaigns, and mobile apps. Digital analytics includes the collection, measurement, and analysis of all of these digital data. This data includes how users reach and behave on websites, mobile sites, and mobile apps, giving companies information on how they are being discovered online and how customers are using their online offerings.

Digital Analytics focuses on connecting points between customer and business properties and includes traffic metrics and campaign performance to assess a company’s marketing effectiveness.

Both digital analytics and business analytics help companies improve their decision-making processes. However, Digital Analytics focuses on web, and mobile performance and user data (or the customer interactions) while Business Intelligence focuses on the operational metrics (processes and stakeholder interactions) to optimize business functionality.

The software that is used to track website and mobile app users is known as Digital Analytics software. Today’s marketing data is so extensive that multiple marketing tools are often used to give business teams an overall view of what’s happening on their digital platforms and customer interactions. Digital Analytics software helps bring together a number of data sources for the marketing team in one place.

Digital Analytics software helps businesses to first collect data, and then process it based on defined metrics and goals. To do this, Digital Analytics software captures data on web and mobile traffic such as visits, session lengths, unique visitors, page entries and exits, and behavioral funnels. It also provides visualization of this data for consumers to interpret.

Digital Analytics software consolidates campaign, website and on-page data into one interface for the business users to gain insight into how their online properties are performing. Digital Analytics software also enables business users such as marketing teams to plan their online communication and test page interfaces based on performance results. It is a critical tool for businesses that wish to establish a data-driven marketing strategy in all their online interactions.

Digital Analytics software brings together data to answer questions on how campaigns or digital properties are performing. By analyzing the data collected by the Digital Analytics software, business users can make fact-based decisions that can increase revenue or reduce cost.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways this is done.

Campaign Optimization

Digital Analytics software ties together offsite campaigns with on-page performance, giving an accurate view of individual campaign performance, with drill-down capabilities. Digital Analytics software brings together metrics such which devices users browsed on, and which geography performed better, and how the campaign performed compared to last month or last year. With this information, marketing teams can make key changes in their campaigns for better results.

Insight into the Customer Journey

Digital Analytics software provides businesses insights into what customers do when they come across a brand online. By providing information on the path a customer travels from the initial touchpoint to buying or connecting with an offering, businesses can find ways to improve and shorten the customer journey, impacting the bottom line.

Single View of Campaign Performance

Digital Analytics software also provides a birds-eye view on which campaigns have driven the most (or the least) traffic to the website. This helps marketing people understand which messages resonate with their audience and experiment with similar campaign messages to improve traffic. They can also easily identify and switch off any low-performing campaigns.

Improve Online Performance

Using Digital Analytics software, marketing teams are also able to see which of their landing pages (where the customer first reached their online properties) performed well and which lost customers. This information helps teams know where improvements need to be made on their websites, or mobile apps, in order to impact conversion rates.

Which industries use Digital Analytics Software?

Digital Analytics has grown from being used primarily by e-commerce websites, to virtually all industries with a digital or mobile presence. This includes big players such as retailers, FMCG companies, all the way down to small boutiques and start-ups which are looking for data on what their customers are doing.

Who are the users of Digital Analytics Software?

In businesses, most consumers of Digital Analytics software are those involved in digital marketing and online presence of the brand including marketing teams, product managers, web developers, and analysts. Digital Analytics software can also be used by individuals with websites, and bloggers for data on how their digital property is being perceived.

Digital Analytics software is important to help businesses make better decisions.

By bringing together accurate information on website / mobile app performance, and user behavior, companies can take actions that improve business efficiency and optimize customer experiences.

Let’s look at some of the specific problems that Digital Analytics software can help overcome.

Making Sense of Data Through Visualisation

Mere data is often voluminous and difficult to interpret. Businesses usually need to employ data analysts to obtain meaningful information from their data. Digital Analytics software offers an easy way for business users to model, query and visualize their website and mobile app data for better understanding, without having to rely on IT departments.

Democratizing Decision Making

Decision making has largely been based on experience and “gut feel”. While this has worked in the past, the ability to support decisions with data has enabled more employees to be decision-makers on their own, without deferring to the highest authority for approvals. Digital Analytics software can make marketing decisions more scientific, and put the capabilities in the hands of more employees than just the most experienced one.

Helping Answer What Customers Want

The key to business success is knowing what customers want. Being able to answer this dynamic question is the primary concern of most businesses today. Digital Analytics helps provide answers to this question by offering information on what customers do and seek while interacting with a digital page and by monitoring the actions they take while there.

Digital Analytics software helps marketing teams report on online conversions, user demographics, and content-interaction metrics. Most Digital Analytics software offers some standardized custom data displays, such as the date range or country-specific results.

Nearly all Digital Analytics software are capable of integrating with web development and content platforms for data sources.

In addition, let us look at the following specific features:

Auto-Tagging

Tagging is the way marketers keep track of campaigns and buttons that help them attribute traffic sources. But managing and naming tags can be a tedious and often error-prone process. Some Digital Analytics software simplify this by offering tag management capabilities.

Custom Reporting

Marketing teams need to know how they performed month after month, and this requires constant measurement and the ability to compare those results with a previous time frame to note improvement or falls. Digital Analytics software enables users to program monthly reports and email them out to concerned stakeholders, set alerts when metrics vary beyond an established range and compare performances against previous months and years.

Split Testing

Many Digital Analytics software offer marketers the ability to split-test their landing pages automatically. This means that the business user can designate the landing pages that are to be tested, and the Digital Analytics software shows each test page in turn, for a page landing. The winner is chosen by a pre-designated conversion metric, after which the Digital Analytics software begins to show the winning landing page more frequently. The capability enables marketers to constantly improve and optimize their landing pages.

Monetization

Digital Analytics software allows marketers to assign a monetary value to each conversion in order to better measure and understand their RoI. This can be at the individual product value level, or even a lead value based on the asset.

Attribution and Traffic

Digital Analytics software brings in traffic data from all the sources that send users to your digital properties. By implementing the right URL tagging during content posting and campaign promotions, marketing teams can use Digital Analytics software to know which of their marketing channels are bringing traffic and the quality of the traffic being brought in, with additional data parameters such as time spent on the page, the number of other pages browsed, and whether traffic from that channel converted, etc.

Audience Insights

Digital Analytics software offers marketing departments with insights into the quality of user traffic on their website, mobile site or mobile apps. These insights are available in the form of drillable audience reports which provide information about customer demographics, locations, browsers used, number of times visited, time spent on the property and other relevant behavioral metrics.

Funnels and Flow

Traffic flow visualization is offered by Digital Analytics software as a way for marketing teams to understand how the majority of users behaved after reaching the home page or a landing page. The funnel visually displays the volume of flow from one page to the other and can be modeled or altered by choosing the starting and ending points to better understand how specific campaigns performed.

AI in Digital Analytics Software

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is enabled by recognizing patterns in large volumes of data and feeding the learning back into a continuously improving algorithm. From machine learning to natural language processing, all the way to predictive analytics, AI algorithms help drive business optimization based on data analytics. Digital Analytics software, therefore, can be enhanced by applying advanced learning algorithms to give better recommendations resulting in smarter decision making.

Let’s look at some of the ways this can happen:

Machine Learning for Intelligent Patterns

Machine Learning relies on huge volumes of data to find insights without explicitly being told where to look or what to conclude. For businesses such as online retailers, machine learning can be applied to customer traffic to help optimize pages and offer users faster access to what they are looking for. One such AI-drive analytics tool is Needl, which is an AI-plugin for a Digital Analytics software such as Google Analytics, which searches for patterns.

Voice-Activated / Natural Query Data Interpretation

NLP or Natural Language Processing enables voice-activated understanding between humans and programs. This technology is currently being applied to voice searches, where the user “asks” for what they are looking for and the NLP interprets and helps give the correct results.

Archie is one example of an AI tool that integrates with Analytics data. Users can ask Archie questions in a bot-like manner, it will present findings in a conversational style. Google Analytics Intelligence also offers applies machine learning to its Google Analytics data. Users can type in a natural language query, such as "Which channel had the highest conversion rate?" Google's AI will deliver an answer after analyzing the data.

Website voice searches for customers are also currently being tested and implemented using NLP. This AI capability integrates with Digital Analytics software to improve website search results for businesses with thousands of products or web pages.

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.

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 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.