Learn about the six problems that may be limiting your analytics strategies
Modern analytics systems can leverage AI and machine learning to process data faster and with greater insights than what a single person can do. But they still rely on people making decisions. As such, errors within the creation and management of analytics still happen. These blind spots in analytics mean that they can be very difficult to address as their very existence can go unseen.
The following six areas may be unseen by your analytics strategy, and by becoming aware of them, you can empower and expand your systems in order to find new and useful data to bolster your marketing efforts.
1. Offline Campaigns
Offline campaigns are just as important as online ones and can be enhanced through the use of analytics integration. Because today’s world of online and offline marketing is intertwined, it is important for your company to understand how customers will move back and forth between them. Kissmetrics points out that by providing trackable discount codes and vanity urls in offline advertising, it can be far easier to see what offline efforts are converting audiences into online visitors. Your analytics systems can track their actions from that moment on.
2. Live Chat
Live customer service chat is becoming more useful, and used, than ever before. According to Forrester research, 44% of online consumers in a recent survey stated that live chat is one of the most important features of a website. While simply providing chat is part of a successful strategy, it is important that you turn your chat time into a quantifiable, and therefore improvable, aspect of your analytics. Gauge chat usage time, related revenue, conversion rates and more in order to see how well your live chat is working and what can be done to further improve it.
3. 404 Results
In an ideal world, a visitor to your website would never encounter a 404 page. But the reality is that even the most well constructed and maintained websites will contain 404 errors. However, not keeping track of these issues will prevent your team from making the improvements necessary to keep them from popping up less often. By implementing a Google Analytics code into a site’s 404 page, companies can see what the visitor entered and which page directed them to the 404, according to MarketingLand.com. Once the data is gathered, you can take action to correct these errors.
4. Popup Windows
A well-designed and properly implemented popup window will grab the attention of audiences at the right time and in the right situations. But companies may not know how effective, or ineffective, their popup strategy is without proper analytics usage. By treating your popup windows as separate pages, your analytics can show you if the bounce rate, conversions and more useful insights associated with a popup. With this information, you can see how effective these windows are and what can possibly be done to make them more effective.
5. Internal Traffic
This blind spot comes in the form of traffic that your analytics shouldn’t be tracking, rather than areas that it should. Depending on the size of your organization, a large portion of the traffic being sent to your website or various sites that you manage may be coming from inside your company. That may make the numbers look great, but it actually skews analytics in ways that are detrimental to your overall strategy. By filtering out the IP addresses associated with your company and its employees, you can create analytics results that are not skewed by employee behavior.
6. Cross-Domain Tracking
Your organization may have created multiple top-level domains in order to meet the various needs of your audience, but what happens when one site pushes a user to another site? As discussed by MediaShift, the security measures in place between top-level domains can prevent conventional data collection and cause multiple records to be created for single users. In order to prevent inconsistent and incorrect data, companies will need to modify and connect their tracking codes across these sites and create a filter that shows the full path of content across top-level domains. As a result, you will be able to see how users behave across more than one site that you control.
Getting a Full View of Customer Behavior
Successful marketing analytics depend on strong platforms that not only provide the insights a company needs, but also allow for consistent improvements based on the data collected. As a company collects and connects more data regarding target audience behavior, a more robust and complete customer view can be formed in order to better tailor your marketing efforts. Ideally, the better you customize your marketing to the interests of each customer, the higher return on investment you will find. And it all begins with a stronger platform.