How to Blend Web Analytics and Digital Marketing Analytics

There are multiple processes to gauge the effectiveness of any marketing strategy. Once you clearly see what’s going on with your campaigns, how your users behave on your website, and which products are the most and least popular, you can define your further marketing steps. If you’ve already implemented digital analytics in your business but aren’t getting the desired results, some data may be slipping through the cracks, causing you not to see the entire picture. Wisely blending web and digital marketing analytics can help you catch the missing data and make your marketing strategy more successful.

What is digital analytics?

Digital analytics is the process of analyzing unified data from websites, mobile apps, email, and other online sources. It provides you an overview of various processes in your business, how your users behave on your website, when they leave, when they return, and when they switch to the mobile version.

Digital analytics is necessary for businesses in all spheres and of all sizes — e-commerce companies, marketplaces, telecoms, and others — as it can be adjusted to your business goals and combine multiple metrics, so you can create custom reports.

What’s the difference between digital marketing analytics and web analytics?

Web analytics is a subset of digital marketing analytics that analyzes the performance of your website. Still, businesses are rarely limited to websites only, which means that web analytics on its own is not enough to provide the full marketing picture. That’s where digital marketing analytics comes in handy. It considers data not only from websites but from other online sources such as ad platforms, mobile apps, CRM systems, and social media platforms.

Transform your marketing data into actionable insights

How does digital marketing analytics work?

Digital marketing analytics explores and compares all of your online marketing channels to show you how they influence one another and your conversions.

Digital marketing analytics allows you to track:

  • How your users behave on your website and across different devices
  • How efficient your advertising campaigns are and their mutual impact
  • Revenue attributed to specific marketing efforts
  • Other business-related KPIs: adding items to a shopping cart, conversions and bounce rate, cost per click, etc.

The starting point for marketing analysis is setting a goal and questions you’d like to answer. To achieve the desired results, it’s best to blend web analytics and digital marketing analytics to get an optimal mix of measured parameters that will perfectly fit your business.

Let’s take a look at how you can blend web analytics and digital marketing analytics.

  1. Configure web analytics for your websiteWeb analytics itself can be a good starting point for more profound further analysis. Track unique visitors, clicks, exit pages, and other parameters to better understand the behavior of your customers and know the weak and strong points of your marketing strategy.
  2. Figure out the parts of your marketing strategy that web analytics doesn’t coverOnce you have web analytics in place, it’s easier to notice the data that’s missing. Do you have a mobile app that your web analytics doesn’t track? Do you launch ad campaigns on Facebook or Instagram? Do you have an offline store? Even if these parts of your business seem less important than your main website, they can turn out to be gold mines that bring you the major part of your customers. On the other hand, data analytics may reveal which channels only drain your marketing budget and don’t bring any profit.
  3. Broaden your reports by supplying missing parametersTo implement digital analytics on top of web analytics, you’ll have to do the following:
    1. Collect necessary data. Collect data from ad services, call tracking services, your CRM, and other data sources. You can do this manually or use specialized services such as OWOX BI to save time and automate data transfers.
    2. Merge gathered data into one platform. To analyze how all of your marketing channels influence one another, you need to merge web analytics and digital analytics data and store it all in one place, such as in Google BigQuery.

Use OWOX BI to easily collect data from multiple sources in Google BigQuery.

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Below, we’ll take a look at how you can go through this process easily and what exactly you should measure to analyze specific aspects of your marketing strategy.

We’ll review some of the digital marketing parameters you can track, their formulas, and what value these parameters bring to your marketing.

Digital marketing parameters for websites

Web traffic sources

This parameter shows which traffic sources bring visitors to your website. The three main sources are direct, referral, and organic search. However, your website can also have other traffic sources — for example, paid search.

Website traffic sources report in Google Analytics

Total number of visits or sessions

The total number of visitors on your website (or your website traffic) over a certain period of time provides you a basic insight on the popularity of your site. Comparing these parameters over time gives you an understanding of general tendencies — for example, whether your website is gaining or losing popularity.

New/returning visitors

New visitors are those who access your website for the first time on a particular device.Returning visitors have visited your website previously. This parameter allows you to see how effectively you retain your online audience. However, if a visitor accesses your website for a second time after having deleted cookies or does so using another device or browser, they will be counted as a new visitor.

New and returning visitors

Online conversion rate

The online conversion rate is the percentage of all user sessions in which a website visitor takes a desired action on your website. This action can be subscribing to a newsletter, signing up for a membership, downloading a PDF, or anything else you’d like your visitors to do. By analyzing your online conversion rate, you can see how effective your internet marketing strategy is. And by analyzing the dynamics of your conversion rate, you can define whether the tendency is positive or negative for your business and plan actions to maintain or improve your situation.

Value per visit 

This parameter shows how much value you get out of each website visit. The value per visit figure you’ll see in reports is the number of visits divided by the total value. The value per visit parameter shows how profitable your website is for your business so you can decide whether it’s worth investing more money to increase the value per visit or whether you should optimize your website to increase its effectiveness. You can figure out the right parts of your marketing strategy to optimize by tracking other parameters such as top pages and exit pages.

Average session duration

Average session duration is calculated by dividing the total duration of all sessions (in seconds) by the total number of sessions. This parameter shows you how engaging your website is for visitors. Short session durations can mean you’re attracting the wrong target audience or the content visitors see first doesn’t satisfy their needs or match their interests. If your average session duration is short (if one session lasts less than 15 seconds), you can try experimenting with the user experience of your website or targeting a different audience.

Top pages

The top pages parameter shows you which pages are most popular among your website visitors. This can show you what kind of content and page organization is most engaging for your audience and, for example, help you discover new ways to make new users see the top pages first.

Interactions per visit

The interactions per visit parameter shows you how many interactions users make on your website (on average) during one visit. Seeing the number and types of these interactions, you can understand how your users behave before making a purchase. Apart from that, you can get insights regarding items that draw your users’ attention as well as items that have the least number of interactions. You can then consider removing or optimizing items and track if and how the number of interactions changes.

Exit pages 

This parameter shows which pages your visitors leave your site from. This will give you a clear understanding of which pages you should optimize by paying attention to overall page usability and the user experience or by improving content.

Digital marketing parameters for lead magnets

Quantity of sales qualified leads 

This parameter shows the number of sales qualified leads (SQLs) your sales team has received from lead magnets. This is a basic metric for keeping track of leads you’ve acquired and allows you to assess your marketing effectiveness. You can set an SQL goal for a month or year and then correlate that goal with metrics you receive in reports on the quantity of sales qualified leads.

Cost per lead 

The cost per lead (CPL) parameter shows the average amount of money you spend to acquire one lead. It’s calculated by summing all your ad costs and dividing the total by the number of acquired leads. This parameter gives you a clear vision of how cost-effective your online advertising campaigns are in terms of generating new leads, which channels are worth further investment for that purpose, and which channels can be turned off.

Conversion rate 

The conversion rate for lead magnets is the percentage of leads that perform a target action related to a lead magnet (generally, an item you give away in exchange for contact details of potential customers). It’s calculated by dividing the number of leads who performed a target action by the total number of leads and multiplying the result by 100%. For example, if 20 out of 300 leads perform an action, the conversion rate will be 6.6% (20/300 × 100%).

Lead generation rate 

Unlike the conversion rate, the lead generation rate focuses not on all actions with lead magnets but only on those that actually convert visitors into leads. It’s calculated by taking the total number of leads captured and dividing that number by the total number of visitors through a specific channel. For example, if 100 of 2,000 visitors converted into leads, the lead generation rate would be 5% (100/2000 × 100%).

Lead generation rate

Digital marketing parameters for social media

Reach 

The reach parameter shows the number of unique viewers of a social media post.

If 500 people viewed your post and you have 10,000 followers, the reach is 5% (500/10,000 × 100%).

To better understand your customers’ likes and dislikes, you can experiment with the timing and contents of your posts. Then, you can correlate the results with the reach and figure out the optimal time for posting as well as the most engaging topics for your audience.

Post engagement rate

The post engagement rate is the ratio of interactions with a social media post to your total number of followers. The higher the post engagement rate, the more involved your followers are and the more they’re interested in the content you post on social media. This parameter also allows you to improve your content and better align it with your audience by seeing the most and least engaging topics, experimenting with content, and tracking the changes in your post engagement rate.

Cost per click

Cost per click (CPC) shows you how much you pay when a user clicks on your ad. It’s calculated by dividing the total cost of all clicks by the total number of clicks. This parameter helps you discover which of your ads generate the most and least revenue so you can reallocate your advertising budget accordingly.

Cost per thousand impressions

The cost per thousand or cost per mille (CPM) parameter shows the price of 1,000 ad impressions on a page. If your CPM is $2.00, you as an advertiser pay $2.00 for each 1,000 ad impressions. CPM is calculated using the following formula:

Total campaign cost / (Total number of impressions / 1,000)

CPM helps you measure expenses for high volumes of ad impressions.

Digital marketing parameters for products and Ecommerce

Sales conversion rate 

The sales conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a purchase. It’s calculated by dividing the number of purchases by the total number of website visitors. With the help of this parameter, you can evaluate marketing effectiveness: track when your sales conversion rate decreases or increases and correlate the results with other parameters in your reports and changes you’ve applied to your marketing strategy. Use it to better understand your audience and plan your next steps.

Revenue by traffic source 

The revenue by traffic source parameter breaks down your total revenue by channel, such as social, organic search, paid search, and referral. It highlights the most important sources of traffic to your e-commerce website and reveals channels your users come from. With this parameter, you can clearly understand which sources generate the most and least revenue, which are worth further investment, and which should be optimized or disabled.

Book a free demo to see how you can build a report to easily track revenue by traffic source with OWOX BI.

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Average order value 

The average order value (AOV) parameter shows the average amount of money customers spend when they buy something on your website. It’s calculated by dividing your total revenue by the number of placed orders. AOV helps you better understand the purchasing behavior of your users, which is crucial for an e-commerce business. Growth in AOV means an increase in general revenue, as you receive more money from each transaction, assuming your number of customers isn’t decreasing. To increase the average order value, you can experiment with loyalty programs and product discounts, for example, and then see how it influences your AOV and, more importantly, your income.

Shopping cart abandonment rate 

The shopping cart abandonment rate shows you the percentage of users who leave their virtual cart after putting items in it. It’s calculated with the following formula:

(1 — (Number of completed purchases / Number of shopping carts created)) x 100%

This parameter also helps you better understand the purchasing behavior of your visitors, as you can see the percentage of potential customers who are already interested in your products or services. A high shopping cart abandonment rate can be a sign to optimize the last steps in your sales funnel, but it’s more beneficial to analyze this parameter along with other parameters in your reports to get a clearer picture of your marketing strategy’s effectiveness and figure out the next steps.

Net promoter score

The net promoter score (NPS) is an index that ranges from −100 to 100 and shows you the average satisfaction level of customers. By being able to track what frustrates your customers, you can quickly figure out the weak points in your funnel and act to improve them. NPS also helps you measure your customers’ loyalty and predict business growth. Even though the net promoter score alone isn’t enough to base decisions on, analyzing it together with other parameters will strengthen your reports on user data and help you make decisions that can accelerate your business’s growth.

How to use digital marketing analytics effectively with OWOX BI

Implementing digital marketing analytics is a complicated process, but the results are certainly worth the effort. You’ll have to identify the parameters useful for your business yourself or with the help of an analyst, but other processes, such as compiling regular reports, can be automated by reporting or analytics tools.

This is especially important in terms of tracking changes over time. It’s not enough to collect data and build a report once. You need to make this a regular process and track changes over time.

OWOX BI allows you to collect unlimited amounts of unsampled data from various online and offline sources and process it in near real-time. With OWOX BI, you can build marketing analytics from basic to advanced levels, merge ad and website data with other business data from sources such as your CRM, and create the necessary reports. On top of that, you can see the dynamics of all parameters and get insights on what you should do next.

Here’s how you can build marketing analytics with OWOX BI step by step.

1. Analyze ad campaigns in Google Analytics

Set up an OWOX BI Pipeline from your ad services to Google Analytics in order to receive data on your ad costs in real time, build reports, monitor how figures change over time, and see the calculations behind the figures.

2. Implement web analytics

Use OWOX BI to collect more raw and unsampled data on your website and deepen your reports. Add data on website users, track website sources, and count the total number of visits to better understand the role your website plays for your business in general and your marketing in particular.

3. Implement end-to-end analytics

Get a complete overview of your performance and see what brings you more money and what drains your budget because of negative ROI. You can build profound reports by tracking everything crucial to your business, including:

4. Set up advanced attribution and reports based on GBQ data

To find the channel that generates the most revenue in a funnel, marketers frequently use single-touch attribution models. However, according to the rule of seven touches, the actual purchase frequently happens only at a customer’s eighth interaction with a brand. Still, all steps affect one another and eventually lead to the conversion. To evaluate the conversion path, set up advanced data-driven attribution and create reports based on data gathered in Google BigQuery.

5. Manage audiences

Create user segments to personalize your approach and make your marketing strategy more precise. Evaluate acquisition channels differently for new and returning visitors, exclude disinterested users, and increase customer loyalty.

Different user cohorts behave differently and, therefore, bring different amounts of revenue and require different communication approaches. Consequently, the budget you spend to attract and retain these cohorts will also be different. With OWOX BI, you can easily manage audiences, exclude disinterested users, and increase customer loyalty.

If you still aren’t sure what the best option is for your business, you can start with basic analysis of advertising campaigns and then develop your analytics further.

Conclusions

It’s difficult to build or improve an efficient marketing strategy without full and reliable data. Before making changes to your ad campaigns, make sure you have a solid basis for further actions.

The parameters you need to track depend on your business sphere and your expectations from digital marketing analytics. If you’re not sure how to blend web and digital marketing analytics for your business to achieve the desired results, book a free demo of OWOX BI to discuss the appropriate strategy with a qualified analyst.

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FAQ

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  • What are digital analytics?

    Digital analytics is the process of analyzing unified data from websites, mobile apps, email, and other online sources.
  • Why is digital marketing analytics important?

    Digital marketing analytics considers data not only from websites but from other online sources such as ad platforms, mobile apps, CRM systems, and social media platforms to provide the full marketing picture.
  • How do I learn digital marketing analytics?

    Digital marketing analytics implementation is different for businesses of various sizes and spheres. To learn how to implement digital marketing analytics to your business, first set your business goal and questions you’d like to answer. Learn more about digital marketing analytics, read How to Blend Web Analytics and Digital Marketing Analytics and other articles in OWOX BI blog.
  • What data are provided by digital marketing analytics?

    Digital marketing analytics provides you an overview of various processes in your marketing strategy, how your users behave on your website, when they leave, when they return, and when they switch to the mobile version.