analytics software

It is a sad fact that much of the data available to businesses all over the world goes unused, which is a real shame as this can mean they are leaving money on the table. It doesn’t matter which niche the business is in, whether they are online or a good old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar storefront. They will have generated enough data to improve their business, make it more efficient and increase the revenue it generates.

This might seem like a big claim, but with the amount of data that is created by a single website visit or, better still, a single transaction, it is easy to imagine which patterns can be derived from a day or week’s trading. It’s not just sales that can benefit, though, and by analyzing the way that your own employees use your resources, you can improve your own working practices to respond to this and increase productivity and, by extension, your business’s bottom line.

Using a Digital Asset Management system 

One area where this can be the most important is when using your digital assets. A digital asset is a video, an image, or some other type of media such as a presentation, and whatever type of business you happen to have, you are likely to have quite a lot of them. By using a Digital Asset Management resource like Brandfolder, you can keep these vital parts of your business secure, control access to them, and get detailed analytics about who is using what, when, and how often.

This means that you can see which resources are being accessed by both your staff and customers and can see patterns about which are the most frequently used and which assets don’t get used at all. There will be different reasons for this depending on which industry your business is in, but this combination of analytics and security can help you get the answers you need. 

Analyzing your website traffic

Put simply, if you are not analyzing your website traffic, you are missing a trick. It has massive repercussions for everything about your website, from the basic design to the way you send traffic to it. Not looking at what people do when they reach your website can mean you are just throwing advertising money down the drain, as you could be getting get clickthrough rates due to browsers rather than buyers.

On a more basic level, you need to start with looking at bounce rates and how long they spent on any particular page. If they are landing on your website and then just clicking away, you are either making the wrong first impression or targeting the wrong type of people entirely. You can solve this by putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and following one of the links from your social media output (more on that later) or adverts and seeing where it takes you. 

Congruency and content

If the link is not congruent, i.e., you are discussing/advertising a pair of boots, and the link just takes you to your homepage and not the page with those boots on, you need to correct that immediately. It could also be that your website looks out of date and takes too long to load, so people get bored with waiting.

You can also see from how long they spent on the page how engaging they found it. If you had a page with about 1000 words on it (about a 3-4 minute read for most people) and nobody is staying longer than two minutes, then that article needs to be given a quick sprucing up to make it more interesting. This might not involve a complete re-write, but instead, the strategic placing of a few sub-headings and images can break it up nicely, so people are not just seeing a wall of text.

Analyze your social media output 

Of course, these days much of your website traffic will come from your social media output, and this will be about looking at what you are posting to see not what necessarily gets the most likes and shares (although this is nice too) but which posts get the most clicks through to your website (and what they do when they get there). Again, if that click only results in a short visit, it might mean that your social media’ voice’ is very different from what people get when they arrive on your website, and you need to address that at your earliest convenience.

Analyze your advertising results

You might have been expecting this to be the first point, but it doesn’t matter how good your advert happens to be. If you are sending the wrong people to the wrong page or digital asset, then you might as well not bother. You also don’t want to mistakenly use low quality or outdated content when promoting your website. For example, grainy photos that people swipe past or paid ads on your incorrectly optimized videos that don’t adhere to each platform’s advertising specifications. So, it’s best to slow down any advertising until you have got your’ back end’ in order before you throw any more money down the drain. 

You are not looking necessarily to create ads that get more clicks. You are looking to create ads that create more sales, as, strangely enough, more clicks do not always equate to more sales, especially if you are getting the message wrong. This can mean you are targeting the wrong age group for your sales funnel or the wrong financial bracket (for instance, lots of people would click through to see more pictures of a Rolls Royce, but very few of those are in apposition to buy one).

Final thoughts

It is hard to overstate the importance of analyzing the data from any activity and results within your business. This holds the key to what your business is doing right, what it is doing wrong, and what it should be doing in the future. It doesn’t matter if you are analyzing the use of digital assets, your website traffic, or the social media output or advertising that fuels it. You can find a lot of the answers you need just by knowing how to read the data that is already generated each day by your business.