Many companies spend time and money picking the perfect digital analytics tool.
With so many options available, each offering slightly different features and terminologies, it’s easy to get caught up in the selection process.
Enterprise tools (GA360, Adobe Analytics, etc.) are often sold as shiny objects and silver bullets that promise to solve all digital marketing issues.
However, the specific tool you choose matters less than how you use it. How well your team understands and applies the tool to meet your business goals makes a difference.
Most tools can meet your needs
Most established digital analytics tools can handle the essential tasks that organisations require.
They can track user behaviour, measure campaign performance, count events, calculate conversion rates, and segment data by countless dimensions.
These tools provide valuable data, but they need to generate insights independently.
The marketing hype and vendors’ salespeople make them seem like one-stop solutions, but it’s up to your team to interpret the data and turn it into meaningful information.
The real difference comes from skilled marketers and analysts
Digital analytics tools don’t tell you what to do or why something happened.
For this, you need humans with analytical skills.
To get the most out of any analytics tool, marketers and analysts need to:
- Understand how to use the tool: Learn all the features and capabilities of the platform. This includes tracking properly, with goals and campaign tracking, and creating useful dashboards to align with your business objectives.
- Recognize the limitations of the data: No dataset is perfect. Be aware of data quality, biases, and data collection limitations. A critical challenge in this area is consent management and lack of consent. With privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, users have more control over their data and can choose not to be tracked. Changes in consent rates can significantly impact your data, making it less consistent over time. Understanding these gaps is essential for accurate analysis.
- Analyze the data effectively: Data alone doesn’t provide answers – or questions. You need good questions and answer them yourself. You must interpret the numbers, identify trends, and draw conclusions that inform your decision-making.
- Apply insights to decision-making: Use the information and insights to make informed decisions. Integrate data-driven insights into your planning and daily operations to achieve better results.
These skills and knowledge are more critical than choosing a specific analytics tool.
As long as the tool has been set up correctly, you can answer the same questions with practically any digital analytics platform.
This means investing in people and skills instead of investing money only in software.
(If you have never read Avinash Kaushik’s “The 10 / 90 Rule for Magnificent Web Analytics Success”, do it now!)
The drawback of using tools just for reporting
Some organisations use their analytics tools only to generate reports. While reporting is valuable, it mostly looks backwards at what has happened.
Unfortunately, the past does not tell us what to do in the future.
(Believe me, I was a historian!)
But if you analyse the data, you’ll see opportunities to improve your website or user acquisition.
If you don’t, you’ll only see what happened previously.
You are stuck with CRAP analytics without utilising your tool’s and team’s full capabilities.