“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” – Chinese Proverb
Knowing your audience is not enough. Understanding who they are, where they came from and why they are doing what they are doing is essential to capturing their undivided attention. You are who you reflect. What captivates you?
From experience and attending an EvoNexus meetup for Digital Marketing Analytics, the data and meaning behind your analytics is dependent on your target audience. No two businesses are alike; every business is different. Therefore, the data analytics for one type of business cannot be compared to another. All you can do is improve and be much better than you were yesterday, a week, a month or even a year ago.
Do you think your audience is interested in what and how you are offering your products or services? Best way to really know the answer is to measure your website demographics and visitor behaviors using an analytics tool. The most common analytics software to use is Google Analytics.
What Are The Four Main Parts of Data Analytics?
- Acquisition – How people reached your website
- Behavior – What are people doing in your website
- Conversion – Are people doing what they are supposed to be doing
- Diagnostics – Is the website usable in terms of load times, browser quirks and user interaction
Understanding what each of these four parts are doing will help you clarify your goals for your target audience and improve your business overall. The most important ingredient is acquisition. Why? Because the beginning of the process determines what goes in as well as what comes out, unless the products or services you offer are what allows people to evolve and become better versions of themselves.
Where exactly are your visitors coming from? Are your visitors worthwhile? Is the traffic your website receiving earning you an indispensable ROI? Your goals need to be specific to understand what you really need to improve on your website to reach the right customers.
Everyone has different goals. An example might be the duration of how long visitors stay on your website. If your goal is to maximize the number of people reading your blog posts, then yes, you do want users to stay in your website for as long as possible.
However, if your goal is to convert users to use your mobile application, the longer time they spend getting to the “submit” button is probably not what you want to happen. Website users have short attention spans. But mobile users have much shorter attention spans. If you cannot convert someone to use your app or mobile website as quickly as possible, you will lose them.
From those two examples, the goals may seem similar, but the meanings of the results are completely different. It depends on the type of behavior you want your customers to do while browsing your website. How many steps does it take for them to convert and become your follower? Do you even want them as your follower?
If the behavior and conversion rates are unexpected, you will have to do diagnostics and figure out where your potential followers are dropping off. Is it the load time, is it the number of fields they have to fill out or is there an unseen and detrimental error? You have to know what you are doing wrong to know how to fix it.
Once you are able to figure out how to fix something, you gain that knowledge to connect it with other parts of your business and daily activities. The wisdom you learn leads you to avoid making the same mistake in the future. The more data you analyze, the better you get at identifying holes in your plan.
A picture is worth a thousand words. But thousand words or data can pinpoint the missing pieces as long as you keep adjusting your strategies, measure, change something and repeat the process until every gap is filled. Every hole will eventually be brimming with solutions and you attain a whole big picture. Wonder what your big picture looks like?
