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Data Analytics: What Is It and How Can I Use It?

Data Analytics: What Is It and How Can I Use It?

With over two billion people connected to the internet, online marketing has become more important today than ever before. Think about the first thing you probably do when looking for a product or service – you likely go straight to Google to search for it. As a business it is important to properly leverage the right data analytics techniques to guarantee that the time and money you invest in marketing your brand will not go to waste.

Data Sources

Data can be sourced from so many places that it is near impossible to decide what the best option or options are. Ranging from customer surveys, market research, Google Analytics, marketing agency audits, and so many more in-depth sources such as advanced data mining, the possibilities are near endless. For the common webmaster, marketing director, or web content manager at a small to medium sized business pre-packaged solutions such as Google Analytics would more than suffice for their data requirements.

Why Reinvent the Wheel

Charts and analytical data on the tablet screen with a cup of coffee and a telephone in the background

The common saying ‘Why Reinvent the Wheel’ can often be applied to the subject of data analytics. Google’s Analytics tools are some of the most comment and powerful out-of-the-box data analytics tools. The best part about using these tools is you need little to no coding experience to fully integrate them into your website. Google analytics can be utilized by simply pasting a few lines of code prepared by Google in the `<head></head>` of your web page(s). If you are using WordPress you only have to include this code once time in the head.php file. Utilizing tools like Google Tag Manager allows for easy management and access to analytics tags and pixels.

Google’s analytics tool is perhaps the most well known and most used website traffic analytics tool out there. Google has become the most utilized search engine through the use of effective data analytics. In typical Google fashion they have made their analytics tools available to you free of charge. Their analytics tools are near limitless in their capabilities. You can easily track your site’s bounce rate, average page views, and even determine the spread by device category. Google even lets you know how many people are viewing your site and what pages they are view in real time. All of the data collected by Google can be exported if you want to be able to manipulate the raw data for custom reports.

Knowing When to Reinvent the Wheel

There are some circumstances where pre-packaged analytics tools cannot quite do the job. One example of this would be for custom applications such as a custom search engine where you need to collect form data from multiple resources (mobile apps & desktop/laptop web apps). A perfect example of where we have implemented this is with the Utterfare application.

When building Utterfare it was decided that we would use Google Analytics to track site traffic data, but then went a step further and created a custom tracking system that tracks user behavior once on the site. It is important to note that no personally identifying data is stored such as IP addresses. This data is then analyzed and used in multiple places. On the client side we provide data overviews such as common search terms and search rankings. As a provider we use this information to provide both the clients and users with a greater overall experience.

Developing your own data collection and analytics tools can be both rewarding and expensive, but you need to think of it as more of an investment than a raw expense. Custom data analytics and collection will provide you with more detailed and industry specific data. The proper utilization of this data can help you build a better marketing plan as well as provide a better user experience for your customers. It goes without saying, though, that even with custom data collection and analytics it is still beneficial to use the tools already out there such as Google Analytics and Facebook’s Pixel.

CBM Web Development offers services such as data mining and analytics. We also include Google Analytics as a standard feature in every website that we develop. Contact us today to find out how we can help grow your brand through effective data analytics.