How to Use the Right Analytics for Your Marketing Campaign
What is conversion rate optimization without analytics? Nothing. Like peanut butter and jelly, the two are truly inseparable. Never do we enter into a testing environment without being armed with a strong analytics case to support our hypotheses and strategies. As a marketer, using exceptional analytics software allows you to track your marketing progress in a variety of ways. This yields numerous benefits beyond higher conversion rates. Analytics enables you to collect a vast amount of data about your target audience.
Website visits, subscription sign-ups, purchases, social media follows, and more provide useful insight into the interests and problems users have. And knowing your customers is key to pleasing them. But not all analytics tools are created equal. Many marketers don’t realize this, making it more challenging to utilize these tools effectively.
Know the Differences
To keep up with the growing demands of the marketing world, it’s vital to understand the differences between at least three types of analytics software. They are historical, real-time, and predictive analytics. Gaining and acting on this understanding is a life or death matter for your business. Choose life by not ignoring the intricacies of analytics or misusing them. Knowing the differences can make or break your CRO strategy, as information the software reveals will be pivotal to understanding what you should be testing to ultimately affect your bottom line conversion rate.
You can further understand the best times to engage with each type of analytics. As a result, collect more accurate data about your target audience. Better identify the rise and fall of consumer trends. Exercise greater discernment to determine how well you have reached marketing milestones. And embrace your newfound wisdom to create a better marketing future.
Look into the Past With Historical Analytics
This form of analytics is focused on past performance of marketing efforts to cater to conversion rate optimization. It’s about understanding what happened yesterday, last week, last month, or last year to determine whether one is making true progress. Using this information properly can help you identify strengths and weaknesses you’ve acquired or lost over time to craft better marketing and testing strategies. Google Analytics is a perfect example of a tool built to collect and analyze historical data.
To further understand the differences between this and the other forms of analytics, we’ll use an analogy of the Weather Channel website. On this website, you have the ability to view prior weather forecasts and visualize the impact mother nature has had. This provides insight about how well communities have adjusted to historical weather changes.
Look into the Present With Real-time Analytics
This type of analytics is centered on collecting and analyzing current data about the impact of your marketing strategies. There’s no need to only look back or look forward to figuring out where you stand. Be in the moment to propel conversion rate optimization. Real-time data can indicate whether your new ads are paying off with increased website traffic and conversions. Tracking social media engagement is also possible.
Getting back to our Weather Channel website analogy, you can access real-time updates about mother nature, such as temperature, precipitation, and humidity. This data allows you to make quick adjustments to stay on top of weather changes throughout the day.
Look into the Future With Predictive Analytics
This kind of analytics deals with future marketing and testing outcomes. Based on current marketing data, this tool can predetermine the direction your leads and conversions are taking. You don’t have to limit yourself to regression analysis to identify upcoming trends for conversion rate optimization.
The same applies to using the Weather Channel website. There’s no need to analyze past forecasts to determine future ones. Real-time data is used to predict Mother Nature’s ways hourly and even monthly. You can also track seasonal factors like prevalence of allergies, cold and flu. Armed with this information, conversion rate testing opportunities aren’t relying on guesswork or hunches, but accrued data that lays the foundation for optimal testing opportunities that produce results.
There you have it! Analytics is a little more complex than you thought, right? We hope our Weather Channel analogy helped clear the air and inspired you to try innovative methods for using all three types of analytics. Want to become a boss at conversion rate optimization? See How to Convert: Top 10 CRO Tips.
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