Google Analytics & Salesforce integration challenges and best practices
Growing digitization has increased the technology-driven methods used for business growth and development. There are various internal procedures in business that need to be monitored and analyzed.
Google Analytics and Salesforce is one such integration used to monitor the visitors to the website. According to the reports, Google Analytics uses 85.9% of data to build marketing strategies.
The website is the central point of interaction between consumers and the company. It gives a platform to understand the customer's point of view, which helps the professional strategize the development, marketing, and promotional strategies.
Google Analytics provides you the essential data regarding the customer, which help to build the leveraging strategies of the business. The salesforce development company uses google analytics for advanced monitoring and CRM facilities.
The important data regarding the customer will also provide a profitable lead to turn the website visitors into potential customers.
Salesforce is one of the potent CRM platforms which integrates and uses customer data in marketing, sales, and promotions. Many top-performing companies prefer Salesforce to build a robust marketing infrastructure and promotional policies.
There are many benefits of salesforce integration, including real-time monitoring and analysis according to accurate data.
integration of Salesforce and Google analytics leverage you with powerful API with integrated data it streamlines the operation for maximum customer acquisition and ROI.
According to a recent survey, around 29.3 million websites use Google Analytics, from which the customer data is tracked for several business-related purposes.
The major motive for integrating Salesforce and Google analytics is to drive the maximum possible revenue from the existing customer data.
Google Analytics collects massive data, and Salesforce uses the user data for revenue-generating schemes.
After successfully integrating Google Analytics and Salesforce, you get a complete 360-degree overview of customers' actionable and business-building ideas.
Google Analytics: An Overview
Google analytics offers a simplified method to track and monitor visitors' activity on the website. This analytical data helps to strategize with reporting tools and web analytics to build the leveraging strategies with data insights.
Google tools define your website's performance, analyzing the user traffic and monitoring the ratio of users turning to potential customers.
Through Google Analytics, you can track and monitor mobile app traffic and social media trends by integrating data sources to build informative and accurate business-building decisions.
Below are the basic factors and running procedures to use Google analytics for website monitoring:
- Google Analytics needs a sign-in from an authentic google account
- Click on the admin button on the dashboard (present on the bottom left)
- Create or select the account
- Create property by clicking the dropdown menu
- Enter your site name with the URL to create a website
- Select your industry
- Select the time zone
- Click to get the tracking ID
- Install the tracking ID on your active website
These are some of the basic details to run the google analytics on your active website. Many important and advanced features of Google analytics describe leveraging tools for optimized business marketing.
However, google analytics is used to get real-time data and statistical analysis according to user interaction on the application and website.
Key attributes of google analytics
Funnel Analysis:
Google Analytics facilitates funnel analysis for leveraging statistics for your marketing strategies and campaigns. You can track user activities, from clicking on an advertisement to purchasing the products. Various type of funnel analysis that the google analytics provide are:
- Multiple medium funnels
- Purchasing and checkout funnels
Visualization And Reporting:
It is one of the basic features of google analytics which google analytics provides you for report management, tracking, and marketing campaigns.
Through this feature, you can generate various reports and use them for several purposes. You can also share it effortlessly with your organization.
The Salesforce development company integrates with Google analytics for several advanced reports in many instances. Below is the list of reports that you can generate with the help of google analytics:
- Behavior reports
- Advertising reports
- Conversion reports
- Real-time reports
Data Activation:
It is one of the advanced features Google Analytics provides with users' data and information. Google Analytics uses advanced machine algorithms to get the core analytics on the marketing data of the user.
It also includes the benefits of salesforce integration which uses the variable data for marketing campaigns and strategies. Below is listed core information that the google analytics extracted:
- Predictive analysis
- Smart anomaly information
- Audience and user demographics
Salesforce: An Overview:
Salesforce is one of the best cloud-based solutions providing cutting CRM assistance and support for marketing and sales teams on a global platform.
Using the Salesforce services, the client can track the customer's activity to expand the customer database and build up leveraging strategies for customer acquisition and the company's growth and development.
Salesforce development company offers several cloud-based services with robust architecture and a global cliental base.
Architecture:
The architecture of Salesforce defines its acquaintance with multiple layers and their advantages in variable terms.
- Metadata: Salesforce implements the metadata model that focuses on building and developing an application with advanced customization and scaling aspects.
- Multi-tenant: This salesforce model provides a sharing application to handle multiple clients regarding their services. Most companies select this model because of its robust infrastructure and competitive costs.
- API: Salesforce is a great and robust source of API. This model develops the salesforce app according to high-end customization with advanced planning and design implementation.
Application Of Salesforce:
There is a multi-level application of Salesforce, and thus it is highly integrated with any analytical services. There are multiple benefits of salesforce integration and its associate application.
Below are some of the listed applications of Salesforce which impact the services and customer approach in an innocuous manner. Below are the mentions:
- Data Customization: The Salesforce development company helps you customize your various types of data and information. It empowers the real-time tracking of data according to the user's activity.
- Customer Support: It provides excellent customer assistance to improve the response time of professionals by unifying social media, emails, and calls with a single management medium. It Improves customer support with fast issue solving and connecting to every customer within a minimum time limit.
- Analyzing Customer Data And Information: Salesforce help to assess and understand the customer data according to their perception and interests. You can strategize the customer re-engagement activities to invite inactive customers and plan profitable strategies to boost sales.
- Flexible Data Analysis And Reporting: With salesforce assistance and support, professionals can create several reports to analyze and check the data and records for further planning and management.
Salesforce And Google Analytics Integration:
The major aim of integrating Google Analytics and Salesforce is to boost revenue and statistics with profitable figures.
Google Analytics is an advanced technological solution that provides the analysis and records of the data according to user interaction.
Salesforce development company uses such analytical tools to extract the data and build sustainable strategies.
There are three methods to integrate Salesforce and google analytics. Below is the description of three basic methods:
Direct Integration Of Salesforce With Google Analytics:
It is a free-of-charge option, and in this integration, no third party or outsourcing bodies are involved for integration.
The direct integration process of Google Analytics and Salesforce development company needs a Javascript code in your website, and it with reflected in the lead source of Salesforce.
This integration is opted for by many companies, but it lacks several vital attributes associated with analysis and tracking.
This method of direct integration only tracks the form submission visit but not the original and exploring visit of the user.
In terms of technology, it cannot track the first visit attribution. This term refers to the data analysis regarding the user's first visit and journey.
It does not track the second or multiple visits of a similar user. However, this information is essential to track the multiple rounds of the user on the website to get a core idea about their perception and requirement. This data also helps get new customers like you through the journey, which is how the user landed on your website.
But while directly integrating Salesforce with Google Analytics, the analysis can be recorded when a user visits the website and submit the form.
With a severe budget constraint benefits of Salesforce integration with Google analytics is a perfect way to start, but it has the chance of misleading the attributes in lack of its true source.
Use The Daddy Analytics For Tracking Leads:
Daddy analytics can help track your leads with upcoming opportunities and revenue projections according to the Adword keyword, Ad level, and campaigns.
The daddy analytics helps you track email marketing, organic searching, associate medium and channels, and social media handles.
With the Salesforce development company and its integration with google analytics, you can easily track the group leads and categorize the potential opportunities, including the feature to understand the visitor's behaviour to help the Salesforce start the conversation.
Google analytics and salesforce integration with daddy analytics is a paid service that improves sales revenue and ROI.
Tracking ROI In Google Adwords: Daddy Offline Conversation
Daddy offline conversation is an important tool that helps in integrating Google Analytics with the salesforce development company.
It is a free service that helps with conversion optimization techniques that act as Adwords's robot to track past conversations with the best bids.
This method allows you to track the hard and soft conversations for the sales cycle and associate revenue.
By integrating Google Adwords and Salesforce, we use Daddy offline conversions and Daddy analytics internally within the services.
It surely has some downsides, like it cannot track social media, organic, and email marketing mediums.
To track the lead, you have to wait until lead conversions, and it also provides the Adwords with information and does not define the conversion medium and item.
Brief Process Of Integrating The Salesforce And Google Analytics:
While importing the salesforce information and data with Google analytics, the major key is to integrate the CRM with the analytical data. We will use the Google-generated client ID to get the browser to view the website.
This key is stored in the salesforce development company as a custom field in Google analytics. It is stored as a custom dimension for future reference. The integration of Google Analytics and Salesforce takes place in seven stages:
- Stage 1 To Stage 3: The client ID is saved for Google analytics (as custom dimensions) and Salesforce (as a custom field).
- Stage 4 To Stage 6: GA data importing is used with the automated merging of data into Google analytics.
- Stage 7: This is the final stage when you can get the salesforce information and data in Google analytics and learn to use it efficiently.
Major Takeaway From Integration Of Salesforce And Google Analytics:
Getting the huge data and information with the integration of Google Analytics and Salesforce, there are several key takeaways which you can build the specific reports.
You can use the information to strategize the marketing and sales efficient plans for business growth and development. Below are some major takeaways which you can get:
- Advertisements, blog posts, keywords, and campaigns with qualified lead information.
- Information about junk traffic distracts the sales rep from the valuable consumer base.
- The behavior of qualified leads against unqualified leads.
- Information regarding pages that the qualified leads visit more frequently.
Conclusion:
It is the major information about the integration of Google Analytics and Salesforce development company. The options mentioned above provide a complete overview regarding the use of google analytics and Salesforce.
The integration helps analyze and optimize the lead status in revenue generation and plan profitable strategies. Integrating Salesforce and Google analytics is available with the free and paid version.
The company can adapt the methods according to their convenience and requirement. The methods have their takeaways and limitations that are necessary to be aware of.
We can import plenty of useful and important information to Salesforce and Google Analytics, which lets your sales and marketing team plan sustainable strategies for organization development and profitable strategies.
Author Bio
Gaurav Sharma is a Digital Marketing Executive at Arka Softwares, a leading salesforce development company. He has 4 years of experience in the Information Technology industry. He spends his time reading about new trends in Digital Marketing and the latest app development technologies.
The Best Marketing Analytics Tool
Data is the best friend of every marketer. Without data, a marketer cannot know what is working well for his campaigns, diagnose potential problems, and determine the areas to focus his efforts on.
However, all data are not equal, and knowing the metrics to monitor can mark the difference between success and failure. Marketers have access to dozens if not hundreds of marketing analytics tools.
There are N number of tools in the market. All These tools promise you the ability to process your data and extract insights from it, but is it all worth your consideration?
Why Do You Need Marketing Analytics Tools?
Digital marketers should have a way of managing and measuring the performance of their marketing campaigns with a great marketing plan. This is exactly what marketing analytics tools help them to achieve. Marketing analytics tools help marketers to improve their efforts and prove their worth. Their goal is to make marketing activities more effective and justify the investment.
Marketing analytics tools are capable of gathering data from all channels in your marketing mix and report on them together. They make it easy for marketers to generate reports without relying on data scientists, track campaign success, and perform competitive analysis.
What do Two Minute Reports offer?
Two Minute Reports (TMR) is a Google Data Studio and a Google Sheets connector, Two Minute Reports requires no coding knowledge to set up and use. And getting started only takes a few minutes, since all you have to do is authenticate the data sources you’ll be using.
Apart from others, Two Minute Reports provide data options like automatically setting all null values to zeros. With TMR, Google Data Studio can be set up in a few clicks, including e-commerce, social media, SEO, advertising, and web analysis.
Two Minute Reports supports all major connectors, with many more on the way.
YEARLY
MONTHLY
Two Minute Reports Pricing starts from $5/mo when billed annually. And $7/mo when billed monthly. Providing the highest value for money with all major data connectors and some great features.
Unlike others, Two Minute Reports provides 2 data sources and 2 Ad accounts per data source with their starter plans. For example, if the user chooses Facebook Ads and Google Ads. They will be able to add 2 Ad accounts for Facebook Ads(2 Facebook accounts). And 2 Ad accounts for Google Ads (2 Google Ads accounts). In Two Minute Reports, users can customize every plan. They are given the option to add as many users and data sources as they desire.
The pro plan from Two Minute Reports offers unlimited data sources and unlimited Ad accounts to users. TMR allows you to add 100’s of Ad accounts. No problems! While others only provide limited data sources with their pro plans, TMR offers unlimited data sources. And still costs lower than others and provides great value for the money.
Still Not Convinced?
Here’s a few examples of how we’ve helped our customers. Once a customer, who was running a marketing agency, wanted to monitor how their ads performed on a daily, weekly, monthly and 3 month basis. The customer requested a spreadsheet that can be used as a hubspot, wherein the customer can see all his client’s data. And a spreadsheet for every customer, which can be shared with his customers. Guess what we helped him do it.
Recently, a customer wanted to create a reporting template, not for her users. But for their company's internal use. To see how they were coping up with the needs of their customers.
At Two Minute Reports, we value customer feedback more than anything else. We keep our customer’s needs at the core of what we do. Don’t just take our word on it, check out our customer feedbacks.
Interested in how we compare to our peers
Check out our articles on
9 Ways To Optimize Your Website for Better Analytics
As a passionate business owner, you prioritize great customer service. Your website is your 24/7 online home, and usually is the first way that prospective clients come into contact with you. Strong analytics (usually measured through Google Analytics) lead to better SEO (search engine optimization). Wondering how to optimize your website to get the most views, keep people on the site longer, and reduce the bounce rate? Consider the following suggestions.
1. Responsive Design
Responsive design refers to design that takes into account every kind of device your website will be viewed on. It's not just an option to have a fully functional site on mobile; it's a necessity. Most people use their phones to discover new sites and make purchasing decisions. If your site's not optimized for mobile, you'll lose customers. Mobile networks should be fully functional to support the latest technologies. Need assistance in this area? Do a search using terms such as the 5G charging function to get professional help.
2. High-Quality Copy
Search engines are becoming more sophisticated regarding the content of website copy. Sufficient word count, internal (and high-quality external) links, and expert original content will boost your SEO. Good content also positions you as a leader in your field, which leads to repeat visits.
3. Fast-Loading Images
Want to keep visitors on your site longer? Make your images load lightning-fast. Chances are, you'll need to compress your large images. If you need to do it quickly, try an online option like Optimizilla which preserves images while making their file sizes significantly smaller.
4. Clear Navigation
One of the key factors leading to a high bounce rate (when a visitor visits one page and leaves immediately) has to do with sub-optimal navigation. Chances are, you've bounced from plenty of sites and know the factors that led to your frustration. During the website development process, give several people (who reflect your core demographic) an opportunity to explore your site on several types of devices, and listen closely to their feedback.
5. Clear Call-to-Action
Your visitor has gotten all the information they need about your product or service. Now what? Including a clear, compelling CTA (call-to-action) will lead to direct engagement with your business, either via contact form or some type of sales funnel. Take the time to research best practices for CTAs; it's a sound investment in your business.
6. Appealing Design
Your website design should be clean, appealing, and make visitors want to stay longer — kind of like a beautiful home. Do a deep dive into the preferences of your target market, and make sure your aesthetic aligns with theirs. Try some A/B testing and carefully watch the stats to determine your best course of action.
7. High-Quality Layout
Plenty of negative (empty) space around each design element helps your visitors navigate and perceive each item on your page more easily. While animations (with text and images that move) are extremely popular, be sure they support your content and don't interfere with it.
8. Strong "About" Page
Depending on the type of enterprise you run, you'll have some sort of "about" page that gives visitors a glimpse behind the scenes of your company. Spend some quality time making this page the best it can be; it's usually the second page that visitors visit. Include professional photographs if possible. Excellent "about" pages increase the "like, know, and trust" factor that leads to buy-in.
9. Real-Time Communication Options
Your prospective customers might not have the time to wait for you to respond to an email request. If it fits your way of doing business, consider real-time communication options such as live chat or a chatbot. Doing so will improve customer satisfaction and keep visitors engaged with your site for longer periods of time.
Optimizing your website for better analytics requires close attention to the interaction of several crucial elements. Give these ideas a try to smooth the way toward more positive outcomes.
SEO Monitoring: How to Track Your SEO Progress
Many strategies help to ensure business growth. SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and many more. Each of these strategies requires a budget amongst other resources to produce results. A business needs to devote time, personnel, skills, and many others during a campaign and certain metrics will be used to measure the campaign success. These metrics are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and KPIs help companies to save time and money.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most efficient digital strategies that a company can implement to attract organic traffic and increase visibility. As a business owner, here are five ways that you can track or monitor your SEO progress.
- Organic Traffic: The first way to know if your SEO strategy has been effective so far is to check the number of organic traffic that your website is getting. By organic traffic, it means the number of curious internet users who searched for something and clicked on your website because it appeared on the search result page. Organic traffic is proof that you have been able to identify your target audience, you know what they are searching for, and you have been able to use the right keywords to provide valuable information for them. The more organic traffic that you get on your website, the more certain you are that your SEO strategy is working.
- Keywords: A keyword could be a single word and it could be a phrase. When you search for a term on a search engine, your input is a keyword. As a business owner, you want to find specific keywords that your target audience will use to access search engines. These keywords will be used in your website optimization to make your page rank highly among search results. Research has shown that over 25% of people click on the first results when they search for a term on Google. The goal of your SEO strategy is to make sure that you rank on the first page of a search engine (possibly the first). To do this, you can search for keywords that your target audience will use and see the ranking position of your website
- Website Scraping: Another way to track your SEO progress is to check the website of your competitors to find how and why they are doing well, or better than you. You can deploy bots to go through the website of your competitors to analyze their SEO performance. These bots will feed you information like keywords, tags, headers, and other metrics that your competitors use to rank higher on search engines. This strategy is very helpful to understand the SEO strategy of your competitors and devise a way to perform better. However, your competitors and search engines will frown at this. No business wants their secret exposed and search engines do not appreciate using stolen data to increase your performance. If either the search engine or your competitor manages to sniff your bots, the bots will be blocked immediately. But you can use residential proxies to parse any website without being caught. Residential proxies allow you to access the web using local IP addresses assigned to household users. Businesses make use of residential proxies to gather information, test their strategy against their competitors' strategy, and perform geo-based SEO audits. You can conduct for instance an SEO audit in London with the help of tools or professional agencies.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your click-through rate represents the percentage of people who visited your website compared in contrast with the number of times the website appeared in a search result. If your website appears in 10 search results in a day and was visited two out of these ten times, then your click-through rate for that day would be 20%. Lower click-through rates suggest that you should make changes to the content of your website - meta descriptions, title tags, formatting, and so on. You can check your click-through rate by checking your search analytics on your Google Search Console.
- Bounce Rate: When internet users visit a website, they typically scroll through the website to determine if the information they need is on the website. If they find the kind of content that they are looking for, they stay on the site and if they don't, they leave. Your bounce rate allows you to know how many people actually visited or just interacted with your website. An interaction occurs when a user does not spend time on a website. Low bounce rates signify that you should improve in metrics like your lead magnet or website layout.
Monitoring your SEO progress is very essential to know how effective your strategy is, find out what is and what is not working, and formulate better development strategies. A business can save part of its budget by monitoring its SEO progress and fixing any errors as soon as possible.
Qualitative and quantitative data in web analytic
Having the ability to collect and interpret data is an incredibly important part of any process or method related to web analytics. To do this, the first thing to do is learn to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative data.
The typologies and groupings of the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data are very useful for the analyst to reach conclusions. They influence strategic business decisions and design processes.
In web analytics, the information that we obtain through digital channels is initially divided into two large groups.
Quantitative data
Quantitative data is data that comes in the form of numbers, amounts, percentages, proportions, or metrics. They are often used in the early stages of deployment when determining key performance indicators and metrics to sample. In this area, we are talking about the volume of data generated over time.
Thanks to this type of data, hypotheses can be established for tests and experiments. A/B and multivariate tests can also be used to extract information and reports of different kinds.
Why quantitative data is important.
Quantitative data is important as it helps us measure campaign performance, such as conversion rate, sessions, task completion, etc. It also helps to know how many users reach each stage of the customer journey to improve processes and achieve more conversions or sales.
Quantitative data is quick and inexpensive to collect, easy to analyze, and can be visualized in graphs, diagrams, and tables. They make it easy for interested parties to know the numbers associated with the business to make estimates. They make guesses to really understand the value they bring.
Having these references will help in the growth phases or conversion rate optimization since they highlight possible changes and improvements. The input of this data can be constant thanks to different analytical systems. Detecting opportunities is essential to justify actions by establishing priorities.
Collecting quantitative data
Quantitative data is typically collected by implementing tracking systems on websites and applications. The information is sent thanks to the cookies that are stored through the browser or through scripts included in the pages that connect with servers in the background.
Among many important information that we will have at our disposal are:
- Behavioral analytical data such as visits, time spent or bounce rate.
- Information associated with the different stages of the conversion funnel.
- Estimated references based on specific metrics or more complete dashboards.
Qualitative data
Qualitative data is data that we learn to interpret and make sense of within its context. An example is opinions about user experience or behaviors that respond to cognitive biases.
The evaluations, positive or not, from the public or customers on the product pages of an ecommerce, are another example. This data is related to user satisfaction levels and their emotions. Numbers and metrics can also give away and reveal feelings.
Why qualitative data is important
Quality qualitative data is very important as it helps us understand the reason behind the behavior of a user. They can help paint a complete picture of the buyer persona and help us to empathize with him. We assess how you reason or think, what you feel and probably what you need.
We go to them to find out the preferences and tastes of groups of people and define segments focusing on more specific profiles. Well-segmented digital marketing actions, thanks to this data, are the ones that always achieve a higher percentage of success.
This qualitative quality data is used to understand user motivations or discover weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. There is no better way to satisfy demand than by knowing the consumer's concerns, problems or needs. The number of clicks on certain pages or the level of depth when scrolling can confirm your degree of interest in the content.
Qualitative data categorization also helps us diagnose problems related to our products or services. With them, we will be able to know how our target audience perceives the value proposition. And most importantly, discover new pain points or perhaps elements of differentiation with respect to the competition.
Collecting qualitative data
To collect qualitative data, it is best to prepare a suitable web page, framework or environment. It can be a user interface with forms that include text fields, checkboxes and radio buttons, specifically designed for the occasion.
It can also be an online survey, a newsletter that includes an external link or a module on the web that asks for ratings. Here are more examples:
- Interfaces or question lists for collecting survey information.
- User interviews through online or offline channels.
- Usability testing to validate web designs or digital products.
- Interfaces aimed at more specific focus groups to open the market.
Web and App development companies, carry out web design projects using technologies with the most recommended and proven standards, if you need a new website for your business or renew the one you already have, get in touch with us. We will advise you on the different alternatives to develop it.
A good qualitative and quantitative database in web analytics is most useful when used together. Qualitative data such as online surveys help uncover problems and opportunities. Quantitative data can help validate points of view and confirm what we think.
The combination of different layers of data should serve specific business objectives. Measuring selected aspects or events based on hypotheses will always be better than measuring all kinds of elements without establishing criteria. Time management, methodologies and available resources to analyze play a decisive role. This include choosing the right tools.
Regular Expressions as a Powerful Tool for the Analyst’s Tool Kit
Regular expressions can seem pretty intimidating at first, especially if you have little to no software development experience like myself. Your first glance at a regular expression string might even make you want to curl up into the fetal position and cry for your mama. After facing your fears, you’ll soon realize that regular expressions aren’t as bad as they seem. In fact, using regular expressions in your analysis can be an extremely powerful tool to add to your analysis skill set.
What Are Regular Expressions?
Before I dive into all the fabulous benefits regular expressions have to offer, let’s all get a refresher on what regular expressions are. The following is a brief introduction for the vaguely familiar and for those who are just venturing into the world of regular expressions (don’t worry, you’re not alone).
A regular expression is a programming language that provides a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. A popular use for regular expressions in our world of website optimization is creating filters for reports and goals in Google Analytics. Each character you use in your regular expression is associated with a particular rule. You can combine these special characters and rules to demand specific data sets in your GA reports. You can also use regular expressions as a match type in your goals and in your funnel step URLS to indicate to Google Analytics which pages you would like to be captured and reported within your funnels.
For example, imagine you have multiple confirmation pages for a purchase on your site, one for a logged-in member customer and the other for a guest customer. Regular expressions can help you create a goal funnel that captures the purchase confirmation for both your new and returning customer.
Using Regular Expressions in Analysis
Now I’ll get into an example of a handy use of regular expressions for some data analysis in Google Analytics. This explanation assumes that you have read the 14 post series and understand a little about how to create regular expressions of your own.
Let’s pretend you have a large number of pages on your site (as many ecommerce websites out there do). You want to shine a spotlight on just your product pages to understand how they are performing. If you pull up a top content report, you find that you are looking at a data set with too much information. Your product pages are lost mixed in with your homepage, various category pages, and your checkout process. What’s an analyst to do? Regular Expressions to the rescue!
First, take a look at the html structure of the site before even beginning to tackle writing a regular expression. View multiple product pages and note their similarities and differences in html structure. Try to identify a unique characteristic of the product page html structure that sets it apart from any of the other pages on the site. Once you have done this, you can create a regular expression that will only pull up the pages that have the unique identifier in the html structure of your products pages and viola! You now have a regular expression that you can use to filter reports or you can create a custom segment.
The Takeaway
How can this be useful to your analysis? In this particular scenario, you now have the ability to isolate only pages that are of interest to you. It will now be much easier for you to shed light on this data set by sorting your reports to uncover trends and potential challenges. For example, you can see how well highly trafficked product pages are converting in relationship with other product pages on the site.
This is just the beginning of your analysis journey with regular expression in your toolkit. Use your imagination and your knowledge of regular expressions to get a deeper understanding of your site’s performance.
About the author: William S Andrews, a personal development coach. He likes helping people cope with their problems. In this case, William has his own section on the website of write my paper service. Moreover, he takes part in various conferences to improve his knowledge and develop new skills.
Using Digital Marketing Analytics to Grow your Business
We often use the terms “web analytics” and “digital marketing analytics” interchangeably. However, these two practices are not the same. While web analytics explains your website’s performance, digital marketing analytics provides a broader context and helps you turn statistics into measurable objectives.
Here is how to use digital marketing analytics to boost your business.
What is the Difference Between Digital Marketing Analytics and Web Analytics?
Page load times, page views, traffic by channel – those are just some of the numerous metrics you use to monitor website performance. However, if you want to look at the bigger picture and understand how your marketing efforts impact your business, then web analytics is not enough.
Unlike web analytics that focuses on your website performance solely, digital marketing analytics tools observe different digital marketing channels, such as email, blog, social networks, and organic search. That way, they connect business activities and help you determine which marketing techniques contribute to your ROI.
Digital Marketing Analytics Provide Comprehensive Insights
Digital marketing analytics provides you with a full picture of your online presence. The data you collect will help you turn business objectives into actionable steps and measurable goals.
Digital marketing analytics helps you compare your marketing channels.
Say you are running a small business in Melbourne. You have already hired a trusted SEO company from Melbourne to improve your organic traffic, built your presence on social networks, invested in email marketing, registered on local business directories, and started a blog. While you can observe each marketing channel separately, bringing them together may provide better insights.
For example, when analyzing the effectiveness of your email marketing, you probably start by measuring your open rates and CTR. With digital marketing analytics, you can also measure how many of the users that clicked on your link converted into leads. To measure which channel converts the best, you can even compare the performance of your emails with other digital marketing channels.
Focusing on customer data
Unlike website analytics, digital marketing analytics focuses on people and their experiences. They tell you how your website visitors find you. Did they run into your site on Google using relevant keywords, direct search, or via Instagram? Digital marketing analytics also tells you how engaged users are. Do they read your blog, download your eBook, and open your emails?
Observing this data helps you understand customers’ preferences at each stage of their buyer journey. You will be able to adapt your marketing efforts to your customers’ specific needs and, therefore, engage and convert them faster.
Attributing revenue to specific marketing channels
Investing in a wide range of marketing channels does not make sense if you do not analyze which ones deliver the best results. By using marketing attribution, you can identify the channels that are converting your audience into leads and, ultimately, customers.
How to Get the Most out of Digital Marketing Analytics?
One of the most common problems marketers face is calculating the ROI of their marketing activities. There are many reasons why you may struggle to measure digital marketing ROI, including the lack of realistic goals, not setting clear targets, not calculating the right metrics, or not having the right tools to measure success.
To overcome these problems, you need to use digital marketing analytics strategically.
Set clear goals
To measure the success of your digital campaigns, you first need to set SMART goals. Each objective you create needs to be smart, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. They help you organize your marketing team’s activities towards achieving specific and well-defined targets.
For example, just measuring website traffic is not enough. You also need to know what the sources of your website traffic are. Above all, you should also measure the relevancy of your traffic by measuring conversions, such as leads generated or sales.
Centralize your reporting efforts
To get insights into different marketing campaigns, marketers often use a wide range of digital analytics platforms, such as email analytics, social media analytics, website analytics, blog analytic, etc. As mentioned above, fragmented data analytics cannot provide comprehensive insights into the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
Fortunately, there is a wide range of digital marketing reporting tools. They integrate with most digital marketing analytics tools you use and let you set specific goals for each campaign. You can choose your priorities, as well as customize the metrics you track on a single dashboard.
Over to You
If you still rely on web analytics tools, you will fail to observe your digital marketing efforts holistically. Digital marketing analytics lets you analyze all digital marketing channels you use. It helps you identify the most effective marketing techniques, better connect with your customers, and make informed marketing decisions in the future.
Five Tips on How to Collect and Analyze Data
For a business to grow and evolve in the right direction, it must be able to collect data and analyze it effectively in order to determine the next logical step. Unfortunately, new and even experienced entrepreneurs with years under their belts still make the grave mistake of ignoring the data that's right in front of them. Some, on the other hand, do not possess the right tools or have not established the right systematic approach towards processing data effectively. To help you collect the right data sets and analyze it, read on further as we discuss these five data gathering and analysis techniques:
Establish the Issues and Opportunities For Data Collection
The first critical step towards data collection is to identify how it plays any part in your day-to-day operations. Start by conducting an internal and external assessment to figure out the specifics of what's happening in and out of your business by using data scrubbing. Some companies are more rigid and given directions on what problems should be explored and how the data should be gathered. Other companies are given more flexibility to determine when and how exactly they acquire the data to achieve specific objectives. Conduct a thorough evaluation of all existing regulations, practices, and protocols that are applicable to workers and clientele.
Scrape the Web
Web scraping has been around for a couple of decades, and yet a lot of modern businesses are still oblivious to what it is and how it is used to collect data. In a nutshell, scraping the web means extracting information from a website, selecting the important sections, and presenting them in a much more relatable format. Aside from scraping, you can also access data from a website through its public API. Collecting data from websites can be done by checking the site's API or application programming interface, which is a set of routines and procedures dictating how the site interacts with other sites. If you need zip code data, you can contact Zip Code Base to try their service.
Be Observant
Observation skills are undervalued in the business world. A heightened sense of observation can help you collect accurate data without needing to spend a heavy amount of resources into the process. One scenario wherein observation can be used to collect and analyze data is during social events or project activities. You can observe and document participants' individual performances, audiences who attended, etc. This approach has many benefits including its non-intrusive nature and the fact that it's easier than asking participants to fill out a survey form.
Talk to People
Conduct interviews, either in-person or over the phone. Host meetups and focus group sessions. Participate in public forums or other forms of discussion groups. Talking with people can give you a deeper insight and more specific and accurate data sets to work with. Technology can indeed reduce data collection time to the minimum, but the quality of data collected using this method is not always accurate and reliable.
Act on Results
After collecting and analyzing the data, a business can decide to act on the data by either collecting more of the same information or by altering its current business model and strategy. In some cases, a business may need to gather more data since there is not enough to work with or there remains gaps in the data set they are working on. If so, you can either conduct a more thorough assessment or test out a different approach altogether and abandon your current one.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps the last bit of advice when collecting and analyzing data is to involve your entire workforce. All departments should contribute to your efforts of collecting data, while analysis should be left to a specific team or professional.