Measure the impact of marketing effectively to tackle the challenges and exploit the opportunities. Doing this will enable you to turn data insight into your most powerful tool.

Turn data into insight 
Collecting data, for example, generating a report of what day, time and how long they accessed your site for will aid you in creating business outcomes. Knowing this kind of data will ensure you target your audience at the right time. If you are investing in PPC or creating Adword Campaigns, you can use the report to ensure your ads get the best exposure. Targeting a specific market at a specific time on a group of days reduced ad spend.

Manage large amounts of data from different sources across different platforms
Don’t just analyse data coming from one source on one device. All companies are different, as is the way they generate business. Your business’ source of traffic could be coming from Adwords and viewed on tablets whereas your competitor, in the same field, could be generating business from proximity mobile marketing. By knowing the source of the traffic, web design and Ad allocation will be easier and more effective. Designing a web page to be viewed solely on desktop computers will damage your business if your customers view your site on mobiles. They will simply go elsewhere as the usability will be frustrating and now serve its purpose.
Know your customers’ viewing habits!

Use data to drive strategy
Once you are familiar with your company’s chosen data analysis platform, create reports that you will find useful (e.g. one for traffic source and one for frequency of visits vs pages visited) and have them automatically created and sent to you to analyse on a weekly basis. Analyse the data as a whole every month, for three months, and see if you can notice a pattern. If you can’t, continue to do this for a few months until one is apparent. Once you know the process of activity of your average customer, you can then manipulate your website to encourage the end user to view the pages / lead to the goal you have set (i.e. from homepage, to service one, to contact us where the sale is created).

If you’re not sure where to start on analysing data, then get in touch with WMiW or see what other projects have been carried out.