Digital analytics is the collection, processing, and interpretation of data to generate useful information to improve specific aspects of a digital project. According to experts specializing in a Professional Master’s Degree in Technological Projects Management, Advanced Analytics is essential to carrying out digital marketing and supplies an unclouded vision of its development.
As it is known, all our digital actions leave a mark such as mobile connections, Wi-Fi networks, web pages we visit, activity on social networks, and transaction information. It can be considered pure information because it is stored, visualized, shared, and transformed at every moment, which generates a large amount of data to analyze.
What are the goals of digital analytics?
Analytics helps to find the strengths and weaknesses of a project. In this way, advertising investment can be perfected to achieve better results with less investment. There are many tools, platforms, and information to design an analytical monitoring plan, however, it is necessary to have clear the aim of analysis and the process to follow to not get confused with all those alternatives that it offers us.
Beyond the general idea of extracting useful knowledge from the data, we can identify four general aims of analysis that can guide you to know which one should be considered according to the purposes of your project:
- Explanatory: This one emphasizes explaining the factors that are behind a fact to better understand its causes and effects. Here appear some questions such as: Why did it happen? What impact did my campaign have? Which users did my strategy reach? Among others.
- Descriptive: It is focused on the knowledge of the object of study extracting descriptive information from a given period. Usually, the documents to review are a monthly comparison of online sales, web traffic reports, weekly activity on social networks, etc.
- Predictive: This looks to set up future projections by following the determining factors that can be carried out over time.
- Decision Making: It is important to integrate the estimates into a decision-making system based on the different estimated results and you are prepared to take the necessary actions.
Methodology to apply the analysis
The areas of data analysis are varied from each other and have a series of different techniques, methodologies, tools, and aims. However, it can be divided into five phases: the definition of goals, selection and access to data, data selection and transformation, analysis and modeling, and maintenance plus optimization.
All of them have the same purpose, making a procedure to relate connections with selected information sources, choosing the most important data after being crossed, cleaned, enriched, and transformed to decide which information will be used. However, this process needs to be confirmed and updated constantly to check that the predictions are always still correct and stay on track.
Google analytics
This is one of the most well-known tools and online platforms developed by Google to measure and analyze what happens on a website or in a mobile application. Interactions that can be measured are session data, users, page views, visit time and bounce rate, interactions with page elements like buttons, forms, and others, the use of internal web browser, landing and navigation pages, eCommerce transactions, shopping carts, among other actions.
How does Google Analytics work? This tool uses JavaScript tags and cookies, also considering the user’s browser where cookies are saved. The information can be consulted through its interface in a simple navigation system where you can configure an analysis and a comparison period, add analysis data segments, and perform other actions such as exporting or downloading reports, among others.
It is totally recommended to use some analysis tool to get the best results in the proposed project. However, this is not the only tool to use, there are different options to work with that have the same aim as Google analytics, which was mentioned as being one that has the most complete functions.
As technology evolves, the volume of available data, storage, and processing capabilities increase. In addition, new analysis techniques that are more automated and efficient are appearing. In conclusion, digital analytics is the key to technological development and optimization of digital communication adapted to the needs of each project.
