Web Analytics ++

Have you heard of a story about a guy who lost his ring in a dark alley?

It was dark and he could not see anything, so he went to a nearby lamppost and started searching for his ring underneath it. When asked why he was looking for a ring under the lamppost, he said “Because it is bright here”.

That’s what most web analysts do. Even when the problem might exist somewhere other than what their web analytics data can show, most web analytics folks only look at “Web Data” for the answers. Why? Because that’s all the data they have easy access to. For them “It is bright here.”

Here are some other things that are in the “dark” areas. It is time for you to shine a light on them:

1. Ad Servers – Several factors impact the performance of a campaign, many of them don’t show up in your web analytics tools, they reside within ad servers or with 3rd parties. Example: Which pages the ads were shown, what time was the ad shown, etc… Without that data, you will have an incomplete view and analysis.

2. Conversions – Conversions can happen offline in stores or via phone. Most of the time these won’t show up in your web analytics tool. Make sure to integrate the data from all the conversion points.

3. Social Media Conversations – Conversations about your brand, products, and offers happen outside your domain and impact how people react to your campaigns, engage with your site, and ultimately impact the conversions and bottom line. So without that data, you don’t know why some campaigns work, while other similar campaigns don’t.

4. Mobile - If you don’t have an integrated view of the mobile data with other data sources then you don’t have users’ complete journey. Cross-device tracking needs to be properly set up.

5. CRM - This is the data that the customers provided you, this includes information such as customer name, purchase history, etc. This data helps you understand your user better.

6. Third-Party Sales– Some companies do not sell any products on their site. Their sites are mainly there to provide information. They sell their products via 3rd parties. However, these 3rd party sites also provide information on products, provide reviews, have user communities, etc. You don’t need to visit the official company site to make a decision to purchase something. For example, you might never visit Samsung’s site to buy a Samsung TV. All the research you need is already available on Amazon or Best Buy. Similarly, many insurance providers sell their insurance through 3rd party agents. Game companies sell their games via 3rd parties. What does web analytics data show in this case? Nothing. You need the data from those places to fully understand the campaign performance.

7. Many more - there are a lot more sources that you need to look at, the above list is just the beginning.

To fully understand the performance of your marketing efforts, you need to integrate data sources from these sources with web analytics. This is what the future direction of web/digital/marketing analytics is.

Nowadays tools like GA4, Piwik PRO, etc. allow you to get access to granular visitor data via direct integrations with data warehousing systems like BigQuery. Make use of that integration to connect with other data sources and start impressing your boss.

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