How to measure the impact of the digital strategy?
The impact of a digital marketing strategy can be measured in several ways. Some tools are available to perform these measurements, but care must be taken to the data that we cross to produce these statistics.
This third and last part will therefore highlight the different analysis tools available as well as how to interpret the results obtained.
1. The tools available
According to the authors of Digital Marketing, “there are four main types tools:
Behavioral analysis tools on the Web, from the questioning of selected panels. (of the Médiamétrie type)
The "site centric" tools, which allow a detailed analysis on an analyzed site.
Specialized tools to analyze a particular data or source."Cross-referencing" tools which can analyze multiple data sources,correlate them, and generate powerful analyzes. "Since the majority of tools work on the basis of tags (markers present on each page of a site which are activated each time the page is viewed),
We are going to focus on the "site centric" tools. Still according to the same authors, "the" site-centric "tools can be presented with four different service levels: "Free tools, with the best known being Google Analytics;Paid tools with performance measurement (Xiti from AT Internet,Weborama);Customizable offers, with a first level of connection to ERP(Omniture, Webtrends);Data aggregators, to visualize a set of indicators of a unified way. We also speak of "Business Intelligence" (Bime)
A. Google Analytics
Google analytics is the most widespread and the most used because it offers a multitude of functions adapted to most recurring needs in terms of analysis and statistics. (Ex: Traffic, source of traffic, dashboard, sorting by type of visitors, by date, comparison, etc.) In addition, it is a tool that is constantly evolving, and which therefore always offers more functionalities adapted to new needs. In 2011, Google Analytics notably enriched its interface with major advances such as: real-time analysis (immediate reporting on a series of selected criteria) and progress on the courses off-site and on-site purchasing. (visualize the visitors' journey on the site, which led to visitors to our site, etc.)
B. Statistics on social networks
When a company has a professional social media page, it is possible to analyze the statistics of the page concerned directly on the site of the social network. For example on Youtube (Cf. Annex 6), there is a "statistics" tab which offers many choices for analysis and reporting that resemble those offered by Google Analytics.
As far as Facebook is concerned, it works the same. When a page is created a "statistics" tab appears on the page in administrator mode, however you need a minimum of 30 people who like the page to access it. With those statistics it is possible to analyze the performance of our page: likes, reach of messages, best audience times / days, etc.
For Twitter, there is no analytics tool directly available on the site. However, external applications are available and allow you to perform statistics (know how many times your tweets have been clicked, know the evolution of number of followers, measure the popularity of the account, etc.):
- TweetStats (average number of tweets / day, preferred hours and days, source of tweets, etc.)
- TweetBurner (URL shortener to obtain: the number of users who have
pointed to the URL, how many clicks, etc.)
- TwitterCounter (evolution of your followers and followings, number of tweets from account, etc.)
- Etc ...
C. Statistics on a CMS
For e-commerce, corporate, blogs, etc… It is also possible to view statistics directly via the back-office of the CMS used. Those statistics offer basic functionality, not as deep and comprehensive than those offered by Google Analytics. It is therefore highly recommended to install Google Analytics to measure the performance of websites that allows indicators to be crossed for more precise readings.
For Prestashop, a specific tab called "stats" is available directly from the back office administration panel. It roughly brings together the number of visitors, registrations, number of orders, turnover, etc.
With Wordpress, it is necessary to install a specific "plugin" for statistics. There are plenty of them, and they offer pretty much the same features.
2. How to measure the effectiveness of the strategy?
Now that we know the main analysis tools available, the subject that we will now discuss is how to analyze the performance of the actions taken. According to the authors of Digital Marketing, there is a whole logic to follow in order to achieve at best this step:
First you have to determine what you want to measure. This is what they call "the stage of defining key performance indicators". Each indicator makes it possible to analyze precise behavior according to objectives. Then, depending on what you want to analyze, you have to go through a step that is called "the marking plan". It consists in analyzing and organizing the structure of its site to determine what data you want to collect. It is therefore necessary to detail the tree structure of its site and prioritize it into categories, subcategories and pages.
To carry out this very technical step, the marketer can be accompanied by full-fledged players such as: Uptilab, Converteo, etc.
Finally, it is necessary to gather the key performance indicators in a "table of edge ”. This will serve both as a tool for communicating strategic arguments keys and as a decision-making tool that will present the reasons why certain decisions must be made immediately. To see a little more clearly, the authors of Digital Marketing give us some examples of types of measures with different indicators:
A. The "users" measure and the site measure:
For this type of measurement, the main indicators used are
- Visit
- The unique visitor
- Pages viewed
- The time spent
- The bounce rate
- The engagement rate
B. The traffic acquisition measurement:
Traffic and acquisition indicators are essential for setting up associated campaigns in parallel. Here are some good indicators:
- Direct origins (users who access the website by entering
directly the URL in the search bar / who click on a link in a email / use favorites)
- "Referrers" which measure visits from other Site (s.
- Search engines that say a lot about the keywords to use or which engine is the most successful.
C. The measure of conversion:
The main indicator of this type of measurement is the conversion rate (ratio between the number of visitors and the number of transactions carried out over a given period).
This rate is a key indicator in e-commerce because it allows to highlight the "Ability to transform" or not of the site.
D. Measuring loyalty and the “voice of the customer”
Thanks to digital marketing it is possible to measure the degree of satisfaction of its customers, which is of great importance in managing the reputation and image of your mark. For this measurement there are, according to the authors of Digital Marketing, two types
indicators:
Quantitative data: the rate of revisits; click-through rate and click-through frequency on customer e-mailings; the recency, frequency and amount of purchases.
Qualitative data (also called “the voice of the customer”): enabling customers to express themselves through online satisfaction questionnaires; or capitalize their recommendation potential (Net Promoter Score by Fred Reischheld): percentage of customers promoting our brand less those who had a bad experience with our products / services.
3. Optimize
Collecting performance indicators is an important part of the digital strategy. Because once we have gathered the data, they will be used to analyze and reflect on the changes and novelties to be made in order to optimize our strategy to achieve the expected results.
According to the authors of Digital Marketing, there are two main areas of optimization:
the customer experience and the buying journey.
A. The customer experience
The customer experience is "the fact of defining consistency between the initial strategy and the reality of the journeys made ”. The challenge of this optimization axis is to collect and understand the following data:
- The volume of each route,
- The rate of loss from one step to another,
- The real user journeys (which are different from the one expected)
To better understand this data, the marketer can use something fairly scientific: The "heat mapping". It highlights the times and points of attachment of the look at a web page by coloring the areas set by the user and thus allows identifying the "hot" areas of the page. (Results obtained using the eyetracking method)
After identifying the problems, he can then follow the logic of the "user experience ”(UX: User experience) According to the authors of Digital Marketing, it is breaks down into three levels:
- Information architecture: Organize the information on a web page in order to make the site more readable and easy to access for users.
- Graphics: Ensure that the graphic charter reflects the image of the company, and optimize interactivity (what triggers the passage of the mouse, etc.).
- Ergonomics: Optimize space and tools according to the people who are going use them / that we want to target.