You’ve probably heard about digital analytics more than once or twice, and concepts like dashboards, KPIs, metrics, page views, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc., might sound familiar. In short, your first thought when you hear “digital analytics” might be a bunch of numbers, percentages, and charts that make you want to avoid it altogether.

In a previous article, we showed you the basic KPI's in digital marketing. Here, we’ll give you a quick overview of what digital analytics is, what it’s for, and how it can help your company’s strategy.

Digital analytics: the importance of numbers

William Edwards Deming, an American statistician, said:

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

Even though numbers may seem boring at times, they’re essential for making good business decisions. If your strategy is backed by data, it becomes much harder to challenge and more likely to succeed.

What is digital analytics?

Digital analytics can be defined as:

The study of people’s activity in our digital environments, carried out to understand and improve our business in all its aspects.

In other words, analyzing how users interact with our website, app, or social media to make profitable business decisions.

So, while there are numbers involved, you don’t need to be a mathematician to work with analytics. Numbers are just a tool to help us understand behaviors and interpret them, guiding us to a better strategy.

Setting goals

Before looking at numbers and making decisions, it’s crucial to know what goal you want to achieve. Goals should follow the SMART formula: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

For example, a goal could be to reach a certain number of sales in your online store in a month or to get a specific number of new visits to your website within two weeks. Avoid setting too long deadlines so you can have short-term checkpoints to adjust your strategy.

Metrics and KPI's

Once the goal is set, a common mistake is to start looking at all the metrics a tool like Google Analytics provides. It’s important to distinguish between metrics and KPIs.

Metrics are simply numbers that provide information, while KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the numbers that really help you know if you’re reaching your goals. All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs.

For example, the number of visitors is a metric, while the number of conversions or new visitors would be KPIs.

What can we measure?

Peter Drucker, the father of management, said:

What gets measured gets managed.

And the scientist Galileo Galilei said:

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not.

So, basically, everything can be measured. Simplifying, there are two types of data: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative data answers what users do, while qualitative data explains how and why they do it. Quantitative data comes from logs or code snippets tracking user interactions; qualitative data comes from observing behavior or conducting surveys and interviews to understand motivations. Both are essential for crafting a solid strategy.

What process should you follow?

In summary, digital analytics helps you make more and better decisions, define a more accurate strategy based on your buyer personas, understand their behavior, and know how they interact with your company’s digital channels.

At DigitalMakers, we recommend following these steps:

This article is just a first glimpse into digital analytics. We encourage you to dive deeper and ask us anything you want. Although it may seem intimidating at first if you’re not a fan of numbers or statistics, we promise that once you master some basic concepts, it can become addictive.

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