Digital Analytics — Introduction

In offline businesses, measuring the number of customers coming in, customers your sales team is able to reach out and customers that you are able to retain is extremely difficult.

But in the case of online businesses, this is very much possible. To achieve the same digital analytics comes to your rescue. We can divide customer engagement into three main components:

1. Acquisition
2. Behavior
3. Conversion

Digital analytics help us in capturing user behavior and data on the websites, and based on the customer behavior we can generate insights to determine sale campaigns, set up pricing, and a lot of other useful things.

So how does this work?

Let’s take the example of Google Analytics. To integrate Google Analytics with your website, the user has to add a small JavaScript code on his/her website. Every time a user hits the page, the code will capture anonymous information about the interaction of the user with that website. Information such as Browser’s language, device, OS, traffic source, etc will also be captured. Complete user activity will be captured based on the session’s concept which the tracking code uses. The Analytics code collects and collaborates the complete data to provide us the insights.

Also, to generate these insights correctly, in Google Analytics, the user is required to create Views. Using views, you can specify, what data you want to apply your filters upon for the analysis.

A user is provided with different sets of reports such as:

1. Overview Report
2. Demographics Report
3. Interest Report
4. Traffic Report
5. Device Report
6. Behavioral Report …etc

Google Analytics' best feature is the Detailed metrics established on Acquisitions, Behavior, and Conversions. It gives a complete overview of the next activities the user can pick up.

Another key aspect of Digital Analytics is to determine the source via which the user landed on your website. We can divide these into the following buckets:

1. Organic: Traffic arrived from unpaid search
2. CPC (Cost Per Click): Traffic arrived through paid mediums such as Google Ads
3. Referral: Coming from a website other than the search engine
4. Email: Traffic coming from an email marketing campaign
5. None: Users coming directly by typing the URL of the website

Also, users will be able to track the source, medium, and even the campaign, which will help them in devising a robust marketing strategy. Users just need to make use of Google’s url_builder to incorporate capturing all these elements. Plus you can also create “Goals”. Goals are template we can define to track the conversion rate and specific action on the website like a funnel visualization (Till what step in the conversion process the user went)