Digital Marketing Analysis – The Complete Guide

Digital Marketing Analysis : Digital marketing analytics allows marketers to evaluate the performance of their digital initiatives and inform their decision-making, providing in-depth insights into consumer behavior.

Digital marketing analytics consists of collecting, measuring, analyzing, visualizing and interpreting digital data related to the behavior of Internet consumers. It aims to measure audiences and behaviors on different digital media.

Today, a huge amount of data is generated, increasing the need for brands to use digital marketing analysis to understand their customers and prospects and to perceive and exploit opportunities for marketing actions. We discuss about digital marketing analysis in the article.

Making sense of this wealth of data requires a “model” of consumer behavior.

Procter and Gamble had identified three “moments of truth” for brands:

• The moment of triggering the consumer’s journey, caused by a need or a desire 
• The moment when the consumer is faced with several brands and must choose.
• The moment when the consumer makes the first use of his purchase.

 Consumer Behavior

• The first step is called consideration. After the trigger of the journey, there are brands or offers that will immediately come to the prospect’s mind and that will be, from the outset, taken into consideration 
• The second step is called active evaluation or when the consumer is looking for information, notice to prepare his choice. This is Google’s “zero moment of truth.”
• Then comes the moment of purchase.
• Then comes the experience of using the purchase (post-purchase).
• Finally, comes the decision of loyalty or “habit” that leads the consumer to renew his choice, or even to become the “advocate” of the brand.

At each phase, there is an important question that a brand asks itself and what digital analysis must give an answer to:

• Consideration: how do customers and prospects take the brand into consideration?
• Active evaluation: does the product meet the consumer’s needs better than the others?
• Purchasing: Do promotional efforts at “point of sale” (POS) produce results?
• Loyalty: are customers loyal and do they promote the brand?

The goal of a brand is to make itself known to its prospects and to remove all obstacles to a quick purchase decision. 

Practicing or outsourcing digital marketing analytics requires understanding the essentials of the following:

• The modalities of digital promotion.
• The tools of digital data collection.
• The main objects of numerical analysis.
• The tools of numerical analysis.

The Modalities Of Digital Promotion

They boil down to the following four types of online promotion: video, search, display, and social media.

Video

Online video is a very important promotional vehicle for brands because it allows them to use sight, voice and movement. In this area, TV is seeing its audience decrease, especially among young people, to the benefit of digital video, as evidenced by the development of YouTube and the multiplication of streaming creators.

The measure of the success of an online video campaign depends on the format that gives it:

• YouTube allows the advertiser to know if the user has seen the video or has “skipped” it (skip);
• Another newer format of YouTube consists of very short ads that the user is forced to see;
• Videos in social feeds, Facebook, etc. can indicate whether the user has seen and listened (interest) or not.

Web search

It is the advertising medium that provides the most information on the intention of Internet consumers.

In addition, there is now the online search “near me” on mobile devices that allows you to personalize the questions and answers of the company’s search engine or website.

Here, the goals of the promoter are to get the best ranking among the answers given by the search engine (organic results) and to give the best answer to the question that is asked to the company.

Display

Another very important channel is display media.

Display ads take many formats (banner, video, rich media that integrates different media, etc.).

The main advantage of this mode of promotion is the ability to target specific consumers on the Internet or other media but success is more difficult to achieve.

A “tailor-made” display mode is now available and aims to place advertising in front of a defined consumer. The company indicates which advertisement it wants to place in front of which type of consumer; the platform signals to the company that it has a consumer ready to receive such an advertisement; and the operation is carried out if the company has won the auction. All this happens in milliseconds

 Social media

The use of social media is growing and dominated by six platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Pinterest, each with its own characteristics.

 It’s rare for the consumer to use a single platform but the older a consumer is, the less likely they are to engage with social media.

These platforms have gone from a simple way for Internet users to connect and exchange ideas or photos, into a promotional field for brands and a field of research and free expression of consumers on products and brands, significantly increasing the “power” of the consumer over businesses.

Advertising on social media takes the form of online videos or displays, sometimes text. 

Measuring the success of these promotions ultimately depends little on the type of support; in any case, it is a question of knowing if the company’s various ads and messages are seen by prospects and lead them to retain the company’s offer in their buying journey.

The collection of digital data

Collecting information on the intentions and behaviors of prospects and customers is essential for any company wishing to better know its customers and prospects and to identify the results of its promotional actions. This is the goal of digital marketing analytics.

The main tools used by specialists in this collection are the following three:

-The cookie. It is a name tag placed on a consumer’s computer when they visit a website. If this consumer returns to the site, the latter recognizes him and can make personalized offers. But the site can also keep track of what the consumer has done and exploit it for promotional purposes.

-The beacon. It is a program that loads when loading a site page and triggers activity such as setting a cookie or collecting or reading a cookie.

-The connection or registration to a social network, operations that are equivalent to cookies.

It should be noted that no tool offers the possibility of identifying and measuring the entire consumer journey.

The main objects of numerical analysis.

We can identify four main categories: brand value, prospect behavior, customer value, attribution of results or profitability of marketing actions and channels practiced.

The value of the brand

Measuring brand value leads to several of the following key approaches:

• The perception of the brand by customers and prospects.
• The notoriety of the brand and the memory that prospects and customers keep.
• The consideration with which customers and prospects treat the brand.
• The protection of the brand from the risks of malice or misrepresentation.
•  Brand loyalty.
• The recommendation rate of the brand or “Net promoter score”. 

Consumer behavior 

Here we seek to determine the impact of marketing on commercial results (revenues, volume, profits, etc.)

Measurement can be simple for fully digital businesses that have excellent access to this data. Other types of companies have access to certain information online, but information relating to offline behavior can only be approached and, for example, by the following methods:

• track visitors to a store or geographical area and the micro-conversions they make;
• use location signals sent by digital devices (smartphone, in particular);
• carry out a survey of a sample of consumers.

The “value” of the customer

In a given clientele, some customers are larger, more “profitable”, more valuable than others because of the volume or regularity of their purchases and they must be treated in a particular way (offers, prices, deliveries, financing, maintenance; etc.).

The value given to this type of customer inspires marketing and targeting actions.

The value of the customer can also result from the signs of interest that prospects show (request for information, viewing a video placed on the site or a social network, subscribing to a newsletter etc.)

 We also know that companies try to “measure” the customer lifetime value by evaluating the sum of revenues or profits achievable over the “lifetime” of a customer.