To many brands, web analytics is all about reporting. They use their website data to see which pages are popular, track their site’s bounce rate, and understand the customer journeys which drive conversions.
But in 2017, argues Tealium’s Andy Clark, we will see the role of web analytics greatly expanded. It will, he states, be used both to enhance external communications as well as internal analysis.
At the launch of the 2016 Measurement and Analytics Report, in association with Lynchpin, we heard a panel of customer insight analysts discuss the digital measurement landscape.
Marketers from QVC, The Telegraph Media Group, Thomas Cook Group Airlines and O2 gave us their thoughts on everything from tag management to management buy-in.
Here’s what they had to say..
It’s Black Friday, and you’re quietly confident. You’ve planned your marketing campaign in meticulous detail.
You’re expecting a lot of extra website traffic, but you’ve taken steps to make sure you can deal with it.
Data is helping companies to become more customer-centric but many still lack a strategy.
This is according to our new Measurement and Analytics Report 2015 produced in partnership with Lynchpin.
The vast majority (86%) of our surveyed companies indicate that their “understanding of customers is increasing over time”, while more than half (55%) “use data effectively to build their understanding of customers”.
Tag management is the gateway to the long awaited goal of unified marketing, allowing marketers to fully integrate data and technology to drive relevant, cross-channel interactions in real time.
But there is still some uncertainty around what tag management actually is, and what marketers should be looking for in a tag management tool.
Tags on your website help measure traffic and can assist in optimising your online marketing.
Tags are integral to most modern marketing tools, from web analytics to retargeting to ad serving to CRM.
Here we’ll be taking a beginner’s look at what tags are, what they do and how you can use tag management to make online marketing less arduous.
It’s extraordinary how much of an important role website tags play in the efficiency and success of digital marketing.
A digital marketer’s first responsibility is to understand their customers’ experience so that they can improve upon it. Therefore it’s vital that detailed information on behaviours, platforms, channels and technologies are captured.
All digital marketing activity is measurable. Right?
It’s nice to think that’s the case and there are a lot of people who believe it, but unfortunately it’s simply not true.
The reasons for this are numerous, not least that companies are struggling to keep up with the constantly shifting digital landscape.
In the past digital analytics mainly focused on desktop activity, but now businesses have to employ a broader range of analytics products to measure activity across relatively new channels such as mobile and social.
The new Econsultancy/Lynchpin Measurement and Analytics Report examines the extent to which different analytics tool are used by surveying more than 1,000 digital professionals.
Firstly, thanks for all the great comments and emails I received following the first instalment of this article.
A lot of people commented on the many overlaps between the themes and particularly around the tagging requirements.
Tagging is a great area to explore, so I thought I would take this and a few of the other themes that were proffered before looking at areas to postpone focus, in the next instalment.
If you would like to see these prioritised further or which companies are differentiating themselves in this space, please let me know or add in the comments field below.
The W3C is the global body setting standards for the web. In the past its helped to codify vital online standards such as HTML and CSS but its yet to tackle the issue of the many different types of marketing data that websites now produce and manage.
This is now set to change with the introduction later this year of a new digital data standard that has the potential to revolutionise the way that every website handles marketing data.
It promises to massively simplify the process of rolling out new marketing, analytics and personalisation technologies, but what do site owners need to do to be ready for this revolution?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working to release a global data standard for the inclusion of a data layer to sit on top of your site that will help improve developers’ lives in a variety of ways.
This isn’t a topic that generally gets much coverage, so what is a data layer?
Here are some of the most interesting digital marketing statistics we’ve seen this week.
Statistics include email marketing, online travel agents, tag management, Google+, data collection and ecommerce site speed.
For more digital marketing statistics, check out our Internet Statistics Compendium.