How can digital marketers prove their worth?

Marketers are increasingly demanding more budget for digital channels, but what have they got to show for it? This is the question today’s marketers are facing, and they’re often woefully incapable of answering it effectively.

While marketers have made strides in measuring the ROI from channels directing traffic to the website, they’re far less savvy in measuring the success of their own website, and often have no real visibility of how their site is performing and how that performance can be improved.

We’ve seen countless marketers spend significant sums of money to get users to land on their website, only to lose track of them once they’re there.

Too many businesses are over-reliant on simplistic metrics like bounce rate or total number of visits to inform their site optimisation decisions and, though these metrics are clearly very important, the problem is that they don’t surface specific insights to help optimise on-site customer journeys.

What’s more, getting clear metrics that drive actionable insights is becoming increasingly business critical. With economic uncertainty comes a tightening of belts, and marketing spend can be one of the first to get cut.

Today’s marketers need to be able to prove not just their website, but their job role’s ROI effectively.

Traditional analytics isn’t working

Traditional analytics providers such as Google Analytics are great for the basics, such as measuring overall visits, and marketing channel attribution with link tagging.

The problem is that these products are being used as if they are catch-all solutions giving a holistic picture of website performance. But they’re not.

Metrics such as new versus returning visitors, bounce rate and geographic region are great for telling marketers what’s happening on their site, and form a great foundation for any marketer’s analytics arsenal.

But in order to build the full picture of your on-site customer journeys these aren’t enough. In order to prove the value of their efforts, marketers need to put themselves in the shoes of their senior management team.

While the marketer might find it useful to know that 37% of visitors are dropping out of the funnel on the checkout page, the marketer’s boss will come back with one question: ‘why?’.

The answer is to introduce increasingly sophisticated tools into a marketer’s armoury.

Conclusions

Being able to draw conclusions about how and why users are behaving will allow marketers to provide business insights that stretch far beyond the traditional remit of their department. Marketers that use data to demonstrate exactly why a certain product is selling or not prove their worth to a business.

We’ve seen many different analytics application suites which are approaching this problem in innovative ways.

Measuring actions such as mouse movements can generate new metrics like hesitancy rates and read times: when these are used in conjunction with more traditional metrics they can paint a far clearer picture of how customers are actually behaving on the website.

Marketers can marry that behavioural data with their ecommerce analytics to develop a much more detailed view about which pieces of on-site content are delivering ROI, and which are underperforming.

For example, marketers might find that users are completely overlooking that big hero banner which ate up this month’s design budget, or that a small, forgotten piece of text on the homepage is receiving a lot of attention.

By directly measuring user behaviour in this way, markers will be able to identify zones of their websites that deserve more attention, and those that aren’t worth the investment they’re currently getting, far more easily.

It’s an access issue

Having this level of website performance insight is great, but it’s useless unless marketers are able to communicate the key results and issues to key business stakeholders in a clear and actionable way.

Digital marketing, like many other disciplines, faces a major skills gap. Last year, BCG and Google surveyed marketers from a range of companies and sectors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t rate themselves very highly on their digital marketing skills, with the average score was 57 out of 100.

The answer is for marketers to use tools that show data insights in a highly visual way, allowing the less technically savvy to immediately understand what the data is telling them.

This reduces reliance on a handful of data specialists, and enables more people from a diverse range of positions within the organisation to take up marketing analytics data and begin using it to inform their own decision making for the better.

Using your website analytics as a key tool in formulating the strategy and direction of a business may be somewhat alien to many boards or management teams.

However marketers find themselves in a strong position to be able to add demonstrable value to a business. Website analytics, to many an opaque discipline, is on the cusp of taking centre stage, and marketers should be the ones driving their uptake.