In today's fast-moving digital age, a strong online presence is a key to business growth. Consumers have now become the center of analysis. With increased exposure, data generation and advanced technology, digital analytics opens up a wide array of possibilities which can lead to gainful strategies. Digital analytics has made the market channels more connected and easier to monitor consumers.

What is Digital Analytics?

Digital analytics is the analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data obtained from digital platforms of a business to derive insights about customer behavior and to help in better decision making for an organization. It is increasingly becoming a very powerful tool and can help uncover customer behavior and trends to optimise business decisions. Most importantly, it allows the firms to decipher customer data.

Difference Between Web and Digital Analytics

Web analytics and digital analytics are close fields with the latter offering a more comprehensive view of insights. Web analysis mainly uses online website data to analyze and optimise online goals whereas digital analytics uses online website data as well as other data sources.

Need for Digital Analytics

Virtually every organization today uses digital channels to support offline sales or analyze customer trends and feedbacks. Without digital analytics, businesses would be operating in the dark — without knowing anything about customer behavior. Past behavior history, demographics, location, timing — all of these can give insights which can be used to craft the most personalized digital experiences possible. Customers today expect personalized services that are more relevant to them. In case of bad experiences, consumers can shift to competitors and the concerned firm can lose its market share. So, organizations have to make use of the best analytics techniques available to stay competitive in the market.

How Can It Help Firms to Advance Their Businesses?

Digital analytics has become the foundation for building effective customer experiences. Without the insights gained from digital analytics, important and potentially profitable opportunities will be missed.

With digital marketing analytics, marketing channels across different fields can be integrated. It becomes easier to analyze each channel and it is possible to combine performances of multiple channels together.

It enables organizations to track how individual customers are reacting to various marketing initiatives and channels over time. It can convert marketing activities to sales. Web analytics may generate leads but with digital analytics, those leads actually get converted into a potential increase in sales. This new approach is bringing customers into the center of analysis. Forums and comments in blogs often provide valuable insights for better audience understanding with the use of simple analytics. An effective digital analytics framework will give the best ROI as mentioned below.

What Are the Major Challenges That It Faces?

Firstly, the most common challenge that a company faces is to construct a definite goal or strategy for the campaign. A proper goal or strategy is necessary to derive analytical insights and target meaningful indicators. Otherwise, a fragmented approach makes it really difficult to connect the dots of information.

Companies have huge data sources and channels more than ever mainly due to the expansion of internet users and digital platforms. As a consequence, collecting insights from all these data to gain a single view of the customer can be extremely difficult. It's very easy to get lost in huge data pool even with advanced technical tools, strong computational power and good knowledge of software. This often leads to more focus on noise variables rather than core data.

With so many tools available, it becomes difficult to find the right analytical tool for the task. Traditional analytics software like Google Analytics is generally the first choice for most people but it also has various limitations which inhibit application in certain cases. There are also a number of new tools to choose from such as MixPanel, ChartBeat and Parse.ly. So, choosing the right analytical tool is essential.

Having the right people with the right training in place is obviously important. With changing paradigm of technology, it is essential to upgrade the skills of the people with training from time to time. It can be difficult to find proper training programmes and they can be quite expensive.

One needs to be aware while tracking a cookie on a device so that it doesn't lead to multiple tracking of individual users.

Digital Analytics Requires Right Talent

A study on digital analytics talent across the globe focusing on the US, UK and India, in terms of availability of talent, carried out by Marketale shows that digital analytics talent is much less in India compared to the US and UK. This is because the focus on digital analytics and marketing is less in India and mostly concentrated in IT, software and management consulting firms. This is also evident from the lack of senior professionals in India, compared to the other two countries. The US and UK have much more digital analytics professional compared to India. The below infographics provides more insights on these three countries.

Conclusion

It has become essential to accommodate digital analytics while developing strategies and making decisions for every firm with a digital presence. A right digital analytics plan will help organizations to measure the effectiveness of their digital campaigns. According to Salesforce.com, businesses invested in digital analytics are 19 times more likely to be profitable. However, one should remain cautious to stay in line with the firm's objectives and not get lost in the data sea.