Acquiring data analytics tools is the first step to gathering data for your digital marketing campaign. Some data analytics tools are free while others need payment. But you shouldn’t simply base your choice on the cost. You need to determine which package will cater to the needs of your company. You also need to keep in mind that you won’t lose historical data when changing vendors with software for server-based analytics. Meanwhile, with cookie-based tracking, doing so can be challenging.
Basics of Analyzing Data
Remember the TAO of conversion optimization when testing the success of your website or campaign. The acronym refers to Track, Analyze, and Optimize. Numbers will only tell everything if you know how to interpret them. Remember that the data analytics tools we will be sharing, later on, will not always provide 100% accurate results. That is why you need to know how to analyze trends and changes from time to time. This will get you an in-depth grasp of the execution of your brand.
Leading Data Analytics Tools and Providers
Some of the most common data analytics tools include the following:
Google Analytics
This tool can be found on www.google.com/analytics.
It is usually integrated with Google Data Studio, a free tool for data visualization and dashboarding. You can also integrate it with Google Ads and Google Bigquery.
With this data analytics provider, you can establish Google Ad and Analytics dashboards to fully comprehend customer conversion and retention. You can also use Google Data Studio with data from other sources. This is possible as long as you provide data that is replicated to BigQuery through a data pipeline.
Webalizer
You can download Webalizer at mrunix.net/webalizer.
Webalizer is another data analytics tool that allows you to produce analysis from web pages, such as usage logs and access. This tool is one of the most well-known server-based tracking software.
ClickTracks
Now, this tool can be accessed at www.clicktracks.com.
ClickTracks is a data analytics tool for both server-based and cookie-based tracking. It features Analyzer, a software that provides web analytics. With this, you can understand how your site visitors interact with your site. They also offer products like Optimizer and Pro for tracking sales and revenue.
Microsoft Power BI
You can check out Microsoft Power BI at www.powerbi.microsoft.com
This data analytics tool is the leading platform for business intelligence. That’s because Microsoft Power BI supports a huge number of data sources. Marketers like you can produce and share reports. You can also make use of visualizations, reports, and dashboards. What’s best about this software is how you can combine different reports and dashboards into a single app for simple distribution. Lastly, you can use Azure Machine Learning to build automated machine learning models here.
Third-Party Tools for Split Tests
If you can’t run split tests in-house, you can try third-party services like Content Experiments. This in-built feature of the data analytics tool Google Analytics can make you do split tests easily! You can also see to it that the outcomes are statistically significant.
To try it out, you can do a very simple split test at www.usereffect.com/split-tes-calculator.
Additionally, you can also try to utilize Google Tag Manager if you use cookie-based tracking. Here, you need to include and maintain code tags for your web pages. Make sure to update and modify them from time to time. Google Tag Manager is a convenient way to manage these, especially if you have no prior knowledge about coding. You can access it as www.google.com/tagmanager. You can also try the following tools:
- TagMan (www.tagman.com)
- Ensighten (www.ensighten.com)
- Tealium (www.tealium.com)
Quirk Education
One organization that uses split testing is Quirk Education. They do this to capitalize on their conversion rate and attract more sign-ups for their courses.
The organization is a specialist online educator that teaches students across the globe about digital marketing courses. Their target learners are digital marketers, creatives, business people, and PR professionals.
They believe that the course details page is the most important page since it’s where they sign up for a course and download the lessons. It’s central to the organization’s efforts on the site.
To maximize their conversion rate, Quirk Education needs to get as many sign-ups as possible.
To achieve this, their analytics team took the challenge of trying to improve the conversion rate on the course page. The twist is to attain this with minimal effort and expense. They attempted to place the picture in the right location with a pop of color. A/B testing lets the marketers decide which images will have the best results.
Google Content Experiments is what they used to do split testing. It’s a software that mixes split testing with other analytics within the typical Google Analytics interface. Originally, it was used to test image swaps for people to know if changing one picture can make a difference. It’s true that changing an image at the course information page can make or break the conversion rate.
Two pages with different images were created for each course. Then, they implemented some tracking code on the variation page. The first one has an image of the woman, while the has an image of a DMMA logo.
It turns out that the DMMA logo received a 3.69% conversion rate, while the one with a picture of the student only had a 1.29% conversion rate. There is surely no certain reason for this. However, the logo of the popular organization surely added a level of credibility to Quirk Education.
Pros and Cons of Data Analytics Tools
Tracking, analyzing, and optimizing data is central to digital marketing. These three processes are crucial to the attainment of every campaign. One advantage of web analytics is how you can easily track and frequently optimize. You’ll also use these pieces of information to make the right decisions for your website or business.
But don’t get obsessive about the figures and metrics. It’s utterly essential to keep in mind the border trends instead. Trends are the ones to utilize to optimize your campaign. Ideally, you should take a look at the macro elements or the global metrics way before looking at the microelements of your website.
You also have to experiment with variables while statistically analyzing every result. Finally, you’ll use the numbers to create decisions without assuming the outcomes. As always, let the numbers inform you instead of your gut feeling.
© Image credits to Adrien Olichon
Posted in data analytics
