Easy Ways to Understand your Digital Marketing Results

Digital marketing is constantly evolving. With every new update, there are more metrics available to analyse, causing more confusion about which metrics are useful and which are unnecessary for your business. In our data driven world, which metrics offer the information that actually counts?

A bad habit that marketers fall into is only focusing on the metrics that are simple to understand, such as number of followers or amount of visitors to your website. However, these metrics are often not providing adequate insights about the success or failures of your campaign.

Understanding which metrics are useful for analysing campaigns will in turn increase effectiveness, efficiency and hopefully increase profit. Ask your digital marketing agency to help you understand the difference between the metrics and ask what metrics they’re looking at to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign’s performance.

If you’re not using a digital marketing agency, you may look at Google Analytics to evaluate your campaign, using a variety of high and low level data available. However, not all of this data is useful for the different stakeholders of your business, and finding all the different metrics is time consuming. Why not look at introducing a marketing dashboard?

Automated marketing dashboards are a data visualisation tool to gather, analyse and visualise marketing data in a single location. Key Performance Indicators from Google Analytics, Facebook, Instagram and other marketing channels can be included in one location, allowing you to provide a summary of how your campaigns are performing, easy enough for both marketing specialists and C-level executives to understand.

Dashboards are typically used for reporting, with a variety of dynamic visual aids (charts, graphs, heat maps) as well as simple data points and the space to input text to explain the metrics, learnings and recommendations if required. 

There are a variety of automated marketing dashboards with some free and paid options. When deciding between which dashboards to use for your business, there are a few attributes that you should consider:

• Easily customisable: The dashboard should represent your business priorities, therefore should be customisable to allow you to view the metrics you want to. Many platforms allow users to customise it by creating different widgets, with the option of viewing it as a data point or graphs

• Mobile friendly: it’s important to have access to real time data available at all times. You may want to check how your campaigns are performing while on the way to work or at an important meeting, and being able to access it from your mobile allows you the freedom to do so

• Scalable: You don’t want to have to find a new dashboard if your projects or campaigns increase. Finding a scalable solution that has the ability to integrate data from a variety of sources is one of the best places to start.