What is the best digital marketing/web analytics strategy for your web.

The best digital marketing strategy is how you translate your business objectives into metrics and dimensions you can measure on your website.

The most important thing in digital marketing is not only how you measure and provide a customized framework with the help of web analytics but also what helps you in determining how your digital channels best play together to achieve your KPIs.

First thing First….

‘What Google Analytics will do for your business?’

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic( Wikipedia)

In my opinion, the creation of a right measurement framework is the core element of an advanced configuration of Google Analytics, usually done when you do the audit of the current setup. We believe that every online business should have a measurement plan in place.

Many good blog posts have been written on this subject over the years even Google also provides a number of good resources on the subject, for example in the Analytics Academy.

But I found that good resources can be quite technical and difficult to follow for non-analysts, so I decided to share something in simple term and process which can be understood by anyone.

Understanding your own measurement plan?

The first thing to consider is to know the kind of measurement framework and its implementation needed as a strategy for your organization, it will depend on the size as well as the number of people involved in the exercise. With that in mind, the following key skill sets will be needed in order to create a plan:

• Someone who understands your business objectives and strategy

• Someone who understands web analytics and what it can do

• Someone technical who can set up your custom tracking configuration

For a large organization, this means bringing a number of stakeholders together, which can be a challenge in itself. But for a small business with a basic website can be able to create and implement a measurement plan all by itself.

Step 1 – Define your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs)-

Now chalk down the objective of the business, these objectives in turn will be the KPI that drives you. A kind of universal objective and KPI that every organization has it and likes to measure is revenue so the key strategies to drive revenue could be to increase sales, increase average order value, and to reduce returns.

Once the list of KPIs is complete, have it approved by key stakeholders and ideally the Board. It is worth noting that this list is never definitive and will need to be reviewed periodically to ensure it remains up-to-date and in-line with the ever-changing digital environment.

Some more example for your reference is-

Step 2 – Set the measurable metrics in line with KPIs-

With the basic measurement framework in place, it is time to start thinking about setting specific metrics that can be measured through GA for different KPIs. Should targets be set geographically, or by demographic? How about different product categories?

These questions need to be addressed at this stage as some of the segmentation may need to be considered in the implementation of the tracking code in web analytics. For example, custom metrics and dimensions may need to be set up.

At this stage, the measurement plan should outline the detailed ‘translation’ of business objectives into measurable performance metrics. There is a good chance that not all of the metrics you have picked can be measured using Google Analytics (GA) or any other analytics platform of choice. Social metrics such as likes retweets and repins are good examples of metrics that can’t be measured through it. Although these metrics cannot be measured they are very much aligned with your business objectives.

Step 3 – Start measuring and reporting-

Now that you know what you want to measure, you need to get all the tracking into place. An audit of the existing GA configuration will let you know the gaps and indicate any additional tracking that is required.

On most websites, Universal Analytics configuration is missing. It makes sense to do this before implementing the tracking for the measurement plan, as Universal Analytics offers a wide range of additional tracking opportunities, including custom dimensions and metrics, sending data into GA from your site’s back end using the measurement protocol provides you the insights for measurement.

If you aren’t already using a tag management solution like Google Tag Manager, this is the right time to re-consider. Implementing your tracking code using a tag container instead of adding the tracking code straight into the website code means you will be more agile in the future when changes are needed, when additional tags are needed, or your tracking needs to be modified because of your website changes.

So, these three steps strategy is part of every digital marketer to assess and improve the effectiveness of a website through an effective measurement plan.