Digital Analytics: Finding the Customer Insights That Matter

We have more analytics data than we would ever need, and little to show for it.

As digital marketing has become a core component of every marketing department, the proliferation of analytics dashboards has grown almost exponentially in recent years as well.

According to a Conductor poll of 387 marketing executives, 69% of respondents claim that their marketing teams rely on at least six marketing tools, and 31% subscribe to more than 10. These include marketing automation software, management tools for social media, SEO, PPC, online reviews, and a CRM solution, at the bare minimum. More often than not, these marketing technologies come with an analytics component on top of their core features.

The end result?

Making sense of all that information across tools and channels usually requires some spreadsheets, a dashboard tool, and some staff magic.

With so many analytics dashboards competing for our attention, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data and sidetracked by so many vanity metrics.

As a marketing executive, your time is incredibly valuable and limited. You want to focus on measuring marketing performance in a meaningful way - and easily share those successes with your peers.

The most universally understood (and appreciated) metric is revenue.

What has marketing done to deliver more top-line growth?

For multi-location businesses, that means directly attributing digital efforts to in-store (or in-restaurant) sales. Leading indicators of increased revenue are online behaviors (such as click to order or click for directions), and consumer foot traffic that can be measured around every physical location.

How Everything Fits Together

Attributing foot traffic and revenue to marketing initiatives and campaigns involves examining the entire customer journey, and how each digital channel fits into the big picture.

Avoid falling into the pitfall of treating your marketing channels as entities that exist in vacuums, they influence each other in ways that turn unorganized data into insights about people, not channels or internal departments.

For instance, garnering positive reviews is correlated with improving your business' Net Promoter Score (NPS) or CSAT or CES. By the same token, positive reviews directly impact your search engine rankings and conversion rates across all of your channels, which in turn, boosts revenue.

Active social engagement, especially on the digital assets that represent your stores also boosts conversions, and now even positively influences your search engine rankings on mobile. The underlying reason is that both search engines and customers regard social activity - and timely business response - as actual proof of credibility and trust.

In-store revenue ties these seemingly independent digital marketing channels together as interconnected pieces. What are the key metrics of your brand's typical customer journey?

Track Only Essential Data For Revenue Generating Insights

Beyond mobile ads, the most important digital channels are the 'always on' channels that are working on auto-pilot when consumers are looking for what you sell.

The "always on" channels include paid ads (Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads), SEO, social media and online reviews. Their impact can be accurately measured by setting up a tracking infrastructure so that you receive revenue-generating insights and avoid anything trivial.

To measure the full impact of organic search, the metrics that truly matter are:

• The rankings of your Google My Business listings, store locator, and Yelp reviews by target keyword. The more competitive the keyword, the more search volume, and the more potential new customers you can influence.
• Secondly is information consistency, or match status. This has a high level of influence in organic search. For businesses with many locations, the consistency of business information influences search engine visibility, the resulting traffic each store generates, and by extension, additional foot traffic and revenue.

In terms of social media, focus on:

• The number of followers that fit your buyer persona, engagement metrics, and the online traffic it brings to your website/local landing pages. These are crucial indicators of your ability to reach the right people and ensure greater foot traffic.

For paid advertising, stay on top of:

• Cost per click, clicks and clickthrough rate to ensure that your campaigns are ROI-positive.

Lastly, in regards to online reviews we highly recommend that you keep an eye out on:

• The quantity and frequency of reviews, the average rating of reviews, and the average response time from your team. Consistently garnering a healthy dose of positive reviews and swiftly responding to the negative ones translates to positive brand sentiment and more people visiting your stores.

Less Is More

Tracking a limited number of important performance indicators not only saves you time, but also provides you the knowledge and ammunition to make decisions that will directly impact your company's bottom line.

However, pulling all the analytics for all your business locations from different platforms is practically impossible without assistance. That's why you need software to automate the process of compiling useful data into an easily digestible format.

At MomentFeed, we pride ourselves on our analytics platform which provides in-depth insights for SEO, social media, paid ads and online reviews for all your business locations. We have built partnerships with leading social networks, review platforms, mobile map services and data providers to be able to bring you all the data you need in one place.

But most importantly, we provide easy access to the analytical insights like those above,the ones that matter.

Check out our unique partnerships to learn more.