Know your numbers and know what your numbers mean!

Business analytics examines large and different types of data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and other insights.

What business decisions can analytics provide?

1. Cost reduction opportunities. Analytics will tell you what product or ad campaign is the highest performing.
2. Measuring costs: customer acquisition, lead value, conversions value all can be found when you implement and track analytics.
3. Marketing and product sales funnels work best when SOMEONE knows where people went after they clicked!
4. Organizational analysis – is everything working? Is the campaign delivering? Is the reach as expected?
5. Faster decision making. Data (science) can override opinion (emotion) in decisions. When a client says, show me proof, I can pull up CPC or PPC results and show what’s working and what’s not working.

CPC – Cost Per Click. PPC – Price Per Click. Both measure how much it costs in advertising dollars to drive a customer to the website and/or on to the sale.

Analytics will show you more about your visitors than you probably care to know. Things like:

1. Who is visiting your pages/posts
2. What the audience, demographics, frequency, engagement look like
3. When visitors are viewing your page/posts
4. What device they’re using
5. What pages/posts are getting the most engagement

Data analytics helps organizations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities.—edureka!

Engagement is good. Likes, Comments, Shares, Visits, Clicks is what we marketers live for. Reach; meh. It’s like driving by a billboard on the highway. Reach just means you pushed it out there (one-way communication) while engagement creates two-way communication. Goal!

From a business point of view analytics can help you with:

1. Trends over assigned periods of time
2. Evaluation of exactly what is working and what is not.
3. Free REPORTING tools, views, exports, sorting options, “hard” data
4. How many people visited which sites and what they did once they got there.

If you are an active analytics analyzer, you can find feedback like:

1. Whether your marketing campaigns are delivering traffic to the appropriate destination URL?
2. How or if your newest blog post is helping your search results?
3. How many people who downloaded your eBook also signed up for a seminar or academy with you?
4. How many people clicked on your post and visited your website as a result
5. Is your content relevant to them?
6. How long people spent on your pages and where they went after they got there
7. Did they find what they wanted?
8. How you can assign value to intangibles (leads)
9. Did they complete the Contact Us form?

Finally, in helping a business manage costs, analytics can provide:

1. The customer acquisition cost (CAC) for PAID campaigns
2. The assigned value of a CALL TO ACTION (CTA)

Google Analytics must be connected to your website to show results. For this, you have to work with your web designer to install snippets of code. Facebook Insights are within the Business Manager platform or on the Page itself and can be connected to analytics with pixels.

Facebook has its own set of analytics called Insights. Insights provide a snapshot of the activities on your website like Visits, Engagement, Likes, Clicks, Shares, Audience Behavior, Source, and so much more. You will need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website in order to track traffic from FB to your website. See how here: http://bit.ly/36Whcx3

Analytics are the ONLY WAY you’ll be able to measure your ROI (Return on Investment). ROI can be calculated, against a measurable objective, with a formula: Budget/Clicks=Cost Per Click.

Take the number of people who responded to your CTA and divide it by your budget spent to find your CPC/PPC or customer acquisition cost. So a $500 ad campaign resulting in 500 clicks to the website infers a $1 CPC.

Ready to take on the world? Instead of getting carried away with emotion and opinion, why not give cold, hard, data science a try?

A good rule of thumb is, if it works, do it again. If it doesn’t, don’t.