Digital Marketing Meets Web Analytics – How to Keep Up

There was a time when companies put up a web site with the Big 5 pages: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Products, Store – and that was it. Today, websites are a marvel of code with highly sophisticated web design, advanced scripting and dynamic content living behind the scenes.

Everything Rides on Your Website

With growing sophistication of websites and fierce competition for web presence, you do need to stand out. But remember, you do not need to stand out to everyone. Focus on the people who want what you have – your potential customers.

A solid website with excellent content and an integrated marketing strategy are key to building your web presence. When you first begin building your marketing strategy, you start off with broad questions like: What are your goals? Who is your audience? What makes you unique?

Enter Web Analytics

But answering such broad questions is no longer enough. As the marketing industry becomes more metrics-driven, tracking and analyzing metrics and KPIs has become a day to day task for online marketers. Everything needs to be tracked – from basic metrics, such as unique visitors and bounce rate, through to more advanced metrics, such as content and media metrics or SEO analytics metrics.

As an online marketer, you may have already noticed that your role demands much more than basic tracking of metrics using Google Analytics. As your familiarity with the website deepens, you might begin to ask questions about your users that are more difficult to answer, such as which paths users take on your website, how to do advanced segmentation, how to correlate data outside of Google Analytics, and so on.

And It Gets Even Trickier

The challenges of performing advanced web analytics are accompanied by unanticipated changes in your industry or business. You’re required to learn fast. Overcoming learning curve after learning curve, as additional complexities are introduced to your website and different levels of analysis are required to answer burning business questions.

Your organization might already be using additional tools to provide a deeper understanding of customer behavior: for example, web analytics dashboards, or customer experience, session recording, heatmap, and BI tools. Some organizations even go as far as adopting a data warehouse. This integrates their analytics platform with their native database (for example, a Tableu-Redshift integration) to allow deep yet careful analysis of huge portions of data.

How to Keep Up

Getting to know these new technological areas is crucial in order to gain a deeper understanding of what users are doing on your website and improve business results. But there is a major knowledge gap between basic (or even proficient) Google Analytics usage and this additional set of technologies.

To move forward and grow as a digital marketer, your next step entails becoming more familiar with the entire space of web analytics, customer experience, BI/big data, and more. You need to get a feel for the different technologies and methodologies. You need to know which to choose and how to utilize them correctly to answer your burning questions.

The team at CoolaData – maker of an end-to-end big data behavioral analytics platform – took on a project to make the available content about web analytics and BI for digital marketing more accessible. They built the Web Analytics & BI Wiki – the first knowledge hub that collects all the relevant information on the subject and organizes it in a meaningful structure:

The wiki started with an intensive research project – the first stage was building a tree of over 200 sub-topics around web analytics and BI, including web analytics concepts and metrics, BI for digital marketing, specialized analytics such as mobile or SEO analytics, and web analytics & BI technologies.

The CoolaData team collected over 100,000 web pages that cover these subjects. They handpicked the most relevant ones for each category and divided them into “content types” such as: How To, Case Studies, Real Life Examples, Vendor Information, Product Comparisons, and so on.

The wiki is still in its infancy with around 80 content pages, and new category pages are added on a weekly basis.

We are quite sure this new community resource can save a lot of time and help many marketing professionals become much more familiar with web/digital analytics, BI, and big data.

Check it out at http://www.cooladata.com/wiki